Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan The British government is hoping to hit 24 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity by 2050 as well as roll out a new nuclear reactor every year. But these targets are more of a "wish list" rather than the type of strategic framework you'd need to actually build such capacity, according to a parliamentary committee. The …
Well, you can paint one nuclear power station per year. There are plenty of painters and enough canvas available to supply demand.
Just prevent the painters from using radioactive paint or you need a protective lead-lined building to contain the painters and the paintings (and all visitors entering but never leaving).
I read that as Necroelectronomicon..
The amount of investment that the UK needs to replace Gas, Diesel and Petrol with Electric is madness on a scale I had never imagined before Grant Shapps was appointed Energy Secretary.
Yet even Grant sodding Shapps acknowledges that "Five times more power lines need to be built in the next seven years than in the past 30."
So we need 150 years' worth of infrastructure investment in 7 years, in order to make it to Net Zero by forcing everyone onto EVs and Heat Pumps..
But while it's "easy" to put up a few pylons (provided we have enough steel and copper, and we can pay off greedy landowners HS2-style) it's really not so easy to build new substations and upgrade low-voltage local distribution (i.e. lay new cables in old towns and cities).
Declaring that we shall replace all gas and petroleum with Electric is about as daft as would be declaring that we will decommission all the UK's motorways and replace them with high speed railways. Sure, railways are more efficient and better for the environment. But they are no longer efficient to build in the UK, because we made the mistake of replacing them all with roads decades ago, we sold off the land, and we regulated them to death. Similarly, most of our energy infrastructure is Gas and Petroleum, and the Electric infrastructure is the most overloaded, expensive, unreliable and vulnerable of all the energy networks and couldn't possibly sustain the extra load from decommissioning the other two - much like our railways couldn't possibly support the majority of transport in the country as perhaps they once did.
More nukes near to towns would perhaps help. But with all of the toxic politics (more toxic than the radioactive waste) it will never happen.
There are an awful lot of people who have listened to their favourite village idiot who has promised that 900% of our power requirements can come from wind turbines at 20% of the cost of anything else.
Which technically speaking it could, this requires that you average the output over the course of a year. This is of course somewhat disingenuous as the problem is that ongoing wind output looks like a relief map of a mountain range, where all of the troughs would mean that the lights, computers, heating, charging for EV's and all modern society would cease to exist for the duration which can be weeks in length.
If you want steady output (which is a requirement, not a nice to have) then it leads inexorably to one of the following:-
1) Permanently committing to fossil fuels (Coal and gas in Germany's case; gas heating and power generation in the UK)
or;
2) A logical conclusion that we need Nuclear power to replace gas, and had better get on with building it.
or;
3) A temper tantrum and denial of objective reality in favour of complete fantasy which leaves the status quo of option 1, which is encouraged and funded by companies and countries who make good money selling gas.
Gotta say I prioritise a livable future above all else.
If that means a massive new deal level of infrastructure investment, so be it. If that's too hard, and it means changing the way we live to be more sustainable instead of trying to shove the square peg of millions of unsustaibable lifestyles into the round hole of 'having future generations' or 'averting the largest catastrophe we've ever seen' then so be it.
I cannot imagine the mental gymnastics it requires to warp 'please don't let mass ecological disaster and extreme weather kill and negatively impact the lives of millions/billions over the next century' into 'net zero cult', and twist 'listening to the scientists, the UN, the International Energy Agency, the IPCC, etc. etc.' into 'prioritising polical aspirations over reality'.
Frankly, it reads as out of touch and with a sickening disdain for the future.
The trouble is, the picture isn't as clear as the mainstream media would have you believe, by any means - but you won't find the alternative viewpoints (some of them from highly credentialled scientists) unless you really look for them. A few years ago I would probably have shared your viewpoint, but having had "The Science" rammed down our throats trying to whip up paranoid terror about the new cold, I now always look for those holding the opposite view, as how else do you get any balance? Much of the coronabollox was so clearly one-sided and plain wrong nonsense that it proved a real eye-opener as to how hard they push an approved viewpoint, and how easily they can make the population at large shit their pants and demonise anyone who questions the narrative.
To what extent humanity is causing climate change, and what the outcome of that might be, is something of an open question, bearing in mind that the climate changes anyway. Even if you take it as gospel, much of the "green" stuff is just virtue signalling - wind turbines and solar panels take massive amounts of energy and materials (and shipping) to produce, and have a limited lifespan - and by their nature they are not reliable sources of constant generation. Simplistic movements like 'Just Stop Oil' are really nothing more than middle-class brats demonstrating their presumed virtue. Why don't they set an example? That means no cars, no plastics, no food grown using oil-based fertilisers, certainly no flying. How many of them live that sort of lifestyle (do they walk to London for each of their disruptive demonstrations)?
Which isn't to say that there aren't problems, of course - over-use of pesticides and herbicides has had a massively negative impact on wildlife generally, but observable negatives like this seem to have largely disappeared behind the simplistic message about 'carbon' (by which they actually mean CO2), where people can 'do their bit' by buying a massive electric SUV rather than a petrol or diesel one, and buying their clothes and consumer goods from whichever explotative multinational corporation is currently highest on the virtue-signalling list...
Sadly yes, I agree, my post does read with a sickening disdain for the future. That doesn't mean it's not true. Call me a Cassandra, I call you a Pollyanna.
As an Engineer, I can tell you that the only way that the UK is ever going to get to "Net Zero" is with a hell of a lot of poverty, turmoil and hurt. The country is unprepared for it, and it is kidding itself if it thinks it is going to be possible.
I predict, that the Grid will have to become unequal. Only the rich will be able to drive cars, have hot showers, and heat their homes in winter. And even the rich will not have 100% available electricity - not unless they want to pay even more for an unequal system, where people who can afford to pay extra will be less likely to be switched off when the wind stops blowing. The rest of us will have to lump it, i.e. not drive, not heat or cool our houses, put on jumpers in the cold, and curl up and die in the extreme heat. But on bad days even the rich won't get 100% service. Just like in current South Africa, there will be intermittent service of the electric grid as a whole.
But in this situation, the Grid is weak and vulnerable - if it goes down entirely then we will have difficulty re-starting it. That's summarised in a government feasibility study called "Black Start", and many large operators have said that it might simply not be possible to re-start the grid in an acceptable timeframe if it does all go dark. Could you imagine the chaos if we lost the Internet for a week, never mind all power?
Meanwhile, we have geo-political enemies who would dearly love to see the UK and Europe fall into a pit of doom, and they themselves couldn't necessarily care a jot what happens to the planet. I'm thinking Russia here. So Global Warming means the Siberian permafrost melts.. Great, we can sell even more Gas and might even have some lovely new fertile land, while the rest of the world burns. Global Warming is a Global issue, so if we can't count on support from our enemies, it is dangerous to unilaterally commit to cutting emissions and suffering the local pain that this entails.
Ultimately I think that Humanity has reached the edge of the Petri-dish, and that the only thing that will prolong our survival is a devastating third world war which reduces our population back down to a level that the planet can sustain.
Sadly I don't think there are too many actual engineers involved in the net zero plans. It feels very much like collect underpants, something, net zero.
We've now got talk of giving money to people to bribe them so they won't moan about pylons.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66397256
Just throw cash at it, something might work!
Gotta say I prioritise a livable future above all else.
If that means a massive new deal level of infrastructure investment, so be it.
But as things stand, we are committing to policies that seem designed to maximise the investment we need to make. Take road transport and home heating as two examples. In both cases the aim is to reduce the net emissions of CO2 from their use, in both cases the government has decided to mandate not the goal, but the means of getting there.
So for transport, let's say we could wave a wand and have zero CO2 lecky. We can use that lecky in a number of ways - and we (or at least, the government) have decreed that we use it in a way that mandates massive infrastructure challenges, and effectively blocked an option that could reach the same end goal using existing infrastructure. What am I on about ? Well if you have abundant zero-carbon lecky then you can have abundant zero-carbon (green) hydrogen. Hydrogen is a dead end for other than niche transport uses as it has a really terrible energy storage density (whether measured by volume or weight). But with it you can make interesting things like methane and other synthetic fuels. We already have an infrastructure to store, distribute, and dispense liquid fuels for transport - and our existing vehicles can use it. What's more, I can drive onto any forecourt, fill up at an effective energy transfer rate measured in megawatts, and pay (regardless of brand name on the signage) with my standard debit or credit card. So government have decreed that we will not be able to buy fuel powered vehicles soon, so have effectively stalled development of such replacement fuel options, and mandated that we install a whole new set of infrastructure to power a whole new fleet of vehicles which it turns out have their own problems.
For home heating the situation is similar. We could, right now, add a small amount of hydrogen to the gas - and get a corresponding reduction in CO2 emissions. The gas network is well on the way to being suitable for carrying higher proportions of hydrogen, right up to pure H2. We already know how to build/adapt boilers to use this, and anywhere that currently uses a gas boiler could carry on using one. So instead of accepting this as a viable route, we are being shoved down the route of heat pumps, and only today I read a warning that many properties won't be suitable due to noise issues - the suggestion was that many properties might need to get planning permission before destroying their own (and neighbours') ability to get a good night's sleep.
Of course, what many miss is that lecky is really really hard to store (contrary to what many eco zealots will claim). Storing liquids like methanol and synthetic petrol/diesel is trivial. Storing hydrogen is not too difficult (bring back the old gas holders !). And especially with liquid fuels, it's relatively easy to make them where there's abundant green lecky (e.g. in sparsely populated but sunny countries ripe for solar farms) and move it to where it's needed.
But regardless of what route we take, we won't get there without nuclear - or continuing to burn lots of fossil fuels.
> Storing hydrogen is not too difficult (bring back the old gas holders !)
Actually, it is a bit difficult. Because Hydrogen is so light at atmospheric pressure, it has extremely low energy density at that pressure. It is also a tiny molecule, and is able to leak through thick rubber gaskets that other gases can't permeate. So I think the old gasometers would be leaking like sieves if they were filled with Hydrogen. And if you try to increase the pressure, you increase the leak rate.
The usual way to store it is as a cryofluid, but unfortunately that also has its drawbacks. LNG liquefies at a relatively balmy 120 K (-153 celsius) whereas Hydrogen liquefies at 13-20 K i.e. almost 1/10 of the absolute temperature of LNG. Liquid Hydrogen also has some really weird quantum-mechanical behaviours. I suppose that a Hydrogen molecule in its liquid state has so little thermal energy that the universe isn't quite sure if that energy really exists.
So, the devil is in the details. I think that's why most of the Hydrogen Economy plans which showed such promise in the early days of the Net Zero idea, have now fallen flat on their faces when it comes to implementation time..
The old gasometers stored gas at low pressure - just that exerted by the weight of the top section. The moving seal was water. Wouldn't be perfect by any stretch, but in terms of short term storage for averaging out the variations in supply and demand, probably quite doable. The thing is, even if you need a ittle more engineering, storing gasses (even hydrogen) or liquids, is trivial compared to storing electricity.
Neither is the grid... putting most of the load overnight would make it even less of an issue than having it as a constant.
Additionally with V2G capabilities the fact that the majority of vehicles can sit plugged in for the majority of the time will allow for better load distribution.
Let's remember that wishes are ten-a-penny including the one penny administration fee.
> "turbo charge skills activity"
Hurrah! Good to see that bombastic, hollow Tory wank like this didn't die with the departure of Boris Johnson.
Anyway, the linked article has Andrew "Six Chip" Bowie informing us that "the launch of Great British Nuclear, will put us centre-stage in the global race".
Yeah, because when you resurrect the corpse of BNFL, the most important thing is for the name to have the post-Brexit Tories' favoured form of puffed-up linguistic Union Jackery shoved rather obviously in there.
Seriously, "British Nuclear" not good enough for you? You're so keen on that "Great British" branding, why don't you go the whole hog and make John Bull the fucking logo?
No the anonymous coward is right.
Given the choice between free money and spare time vs. day long back-breaking labour for a pittance, it's obvious that anyone choosing the former is a lazy good-for-nothing. They should go stack some shelves or something. Builds moral fibre.
Yeah - none of the people I know on benefits want to be.
Life deals some people pretty shitty hands - some for a short time, and some for a long time.
The real scroungers are the tax frauds - those on benefits have a hard enough time as it is.
Yeah, who's the actual scrounger? The person struggling to survive on £40 a week whilst jumping through administrative hoops, desperate to find a way out of poverty, or the person getting a contract from a mate in government o provide billions of pounds worth of useless PPE that the tax-payer has to pay to dispose of? With all profits going to a tax haven such as (picks random example), the Isle of Man, of course.
Many years ago a friend who worked in the civil service said that for every £1 the govt hands back to the people it has to take in £3.
Not at all surprising, but Blair went with the idea that no-one is ever responsible for their own problems and government's job is to "fix" your problems by handing out cash. The current bunch of supposed "Conservative" incompetents, aided and abetted by a bloated Civil Service, is no better. Highest taxes ever just so they can give some of it back to us as "government help", the idea of helping us more by simply not taking it in the first place has long since been rejected.
Business seems to have moved from a 'hey, lets be first to market and make lots of ££' to 'lets wait for the govt to hand out lots of ££ first'.
Companies can keep prices artificially high and wages artificially low as they know the govt will make up the difference.
Is it the working tax credits where people can be deliberately underpaid by companies?
EV prices jumped after the US tax credits were increased.
It should be held as an economic axiom that we get less of what is taxed and more of what is subsidized. For example, if government began paying a subsidy for playing tennis, then many people with no real interest in the sport would begin playing for the money. If they raised the subsidy higher, then even more would play, and if high enough, then everyone who could walk would be playing. The more the subsidy, the more tennis gets played. By contrast, if a tax were levied on playing tennis, then many casual players would stop, felling that it wasn't worth it. If the tax were raised higher, even those who loved the game would no longer be able to afford it, and at some point only the rich and shameless would play. The higher the tax, the less tennis gets played.
Now consider that even with the subsidies, few EVs are being sold, really. How many would be sold if there were no subsidy? What was it Margaret Thatcher said, something about socialists always running out of other people's money?
Okay, I'll bite on your right-wing culture war talking points...
- Strikes: people are striking not just because, in real terms, they are being paid less for the same amount of work as they used to be, but also because their working conditions and job security are being eroded in the name of making ever greater profits for business owners/government private capital outsourcers.
- Quiet quitting: It's also known as "working to rule". If you have a contract of employment for 40 hours a week, why would you work more than that, for no pay or recognition? Goodwill goes both ways, and if the employer shows none, it should not be incumbent on the employee to provide free labour. Putting in extra hours does you no good; all it does is raise expectations of your capacity to do work, and then a C-level executive will come in, think that your job is easier or less important than it actually is, and make you redundant for the purposes of increasing short-term shareholder profits. I have seen this happen. I have never seen anyone put in extra hours and get rewarded for it. A toxic work-ethic does nobody any good, because burn-out leads not only to personal collapse, but a reduced quality of work.
- Lazygirl jobs: what the fuck does this even mean? Is this some sort of sexist playground slur? I'd rather have a sensible discussion with an adult please.
- Shirk-from-home: If you can't be trusted to work from home properly, then this is your problem, not mine. I've found that the attitude of thinking that someone working from home must be shirking tells a lot more about the person saying it, because that is what they would do. Meanwhile, responsible adults, who are paid to get the work done, and not for presenteeism, tend to work mroe effectively when not placed in a disruptive open-plan office environment. For example, our business' productivity went up during the pandemic when everyone was forced to work from home, because it employees responsible adults and treats them decently. The opposite of this, a work environment where employees are closely supervised and treated like children, breeds only the response of "if you are going to treat me like a child, I will act like one". So, whilst you might think "shirk-from-home" is witty and cleaver, the reality is more likely to be people shirking in an office by making busywork to appease useless middle-managers.
- Preferring to live on benefits: Clearly you have never had to claim any benefits if you think living on them is preferable to literally anything else at all. Whilst there may be a few people who "prefer the misery," most people in that situation would give their eye teeth for the opportunity to genuinely work their way out of poverty. The reality is, of course, that unless they really luck out and get a well paid job off-the-bat, working will result in a cruel cut to benefits, and exposure to higher costs in the form of tax liabilities, driving them further into poverty. This isn't just bad for them, it's bad for the economy as a whole, because anyone who actually knows anything about economics will tell you that the current system, where tax cuts are given to the rich, results in money being taken out of circulation, whereas cutting taxes for the poor, and genuinely helping them into work that pays an actual living wage (not the governments rebranded minimum wage which is not enough to live on in most places), puts money into circulation, as every pound is spent on living costs and thus circulates in the economy. At the end of the day, you have a choice between an economy where wealth is shared and circulates, and society functions, or one where it all floats to the pockets of a few, gets hoarded, the economy is starved of liquidity, and society crumbles. Which do you reckon we're living in? Maybe stop reading the very biased UK newspapers, and take a look outside, and also at other countries (and not just what those billionaire-owned papers tell you those countries are like).
All of these things are the direct result of government policy, so, yes, all the government's fault.
If someone wants to pay people to do very little, that is their prerogative. On the other hand, maybe they are being paid fairly to do a job that brings in revenue, and it is those who are working many times harder for little extra remuneration who are not being paid fairly? Maybe certain jobs are undervalued?
If your labour is being purchased for x, and your employer is making 5x from that, yet your neighbour is also being paid x, whilst their employer makes 1.5x from it, then you aren't being exploited by your neighbour, you are being exploited by your employer. You might, rightly, not be happy about it, and recognise that your labour is being undervalued, or that of your neighbour is being overvalued, but it's not your neighbours fault; that is known as "sour grapes".
Ironically, "sour grapes" arguments are often those ones reeled out when people observe that some people in society are earning many times (sometimes hundreds or thousands of times) the salary of their workers whilst doing less actual work themselves. Perhaps the alternative view might be that capitalism has allowed too much power to flow to those with capital, and a bit of regulation is required to bring things back into line, to ensure that wealth is properly taxed in line with income, so that it actually is possible to earn more money by working harder, rather than just hastening your own trip to the cemetery.
Those who cry out "Marxism" at this sort of suggestion only display their ignorance of the meaning of the words they shout, not that it will stop them shouting it as loud as they can. A little outward-looking at the social systems in place in countries that aren't terminally in thrall to "the market" will demonstrate how balance is found in neither extreme, but trying to work with compromise and sensible social policy seems to be real anathema to those profiting from greed.
Yeah, because when you resurrect the corpse of BNFL, the most important thing is for the name to have the post-Brexit Tories' favoured form of puffed-up linguistic Union Jackery shoved rather obviously in there.
Wasn't it one G.Brown Esq, who buried BNFL and most of the UK's nuclear industry? Possibly on the advice of his brother, who just happened to be working for EDF at the time?
One of the tricks with a sensible nuclear policy is to be able to manage the entire fuel cyle, which we were trying to do with reprocessing. Also may become more important given Niger's political situation, and that country providing France with much of it's uranium. Luckily, other sources are available, like Australia, which made the recent sub & nuclear deal even more annoying to the French.
Don't we get most of our uranium from Kazakhstan?
Hmm.. I don't know! Something to do some digging around. That country has had a bit of help with it's politics recently, but there are many alternative suppliers.
They supply something like 45% of total world production, and I think they are the closest source to us.
I don't think distance really matters so much given the potential energy density of uranium. Originally it was thought to be pretty scarce, but once geologists started looking, it turned up all over the place. The usual mineral rules seem to apply, ie concentration and cost to extract it. Shipping isn't really a problem given raw uranium (ie yellowcake) is pretty safe.. At least safer than shipping say, car transporters carrying EVs by sea.
Again the trick seems to be picking the right nuclear process and fuel cycle. If we went with 1950's style thorium, there's thousands of tonnes of that laying around in mine spoil heaps because at the time, thorium had no real economic value. With current designs, fuel has been relatively cheap, so fuel rods only get used once. Or there's limited recycling so depleted uranium can be disposed of in other people's countries. Some new reactor designs have the advantage of being able to recycle the nuclear 'waste' that so terrifies neo-Luddites.
Open fuel cycle is a perfectly sensible nuclear strategy. Adopted by e.g.Sweden.
Yeh, but Closed is more fun because it involves both recycling, and alchemy. But it's back to requirements. Sure once-through fuel rods are cheap and convenient, other than storing and disposing of those fuel rods. Which could be re-processed into new fuel rods. This is recyling, which is Green, and therefore good. There's also more scope for recycling with designs that can use old nuclear 'waste', which is again much Greener than burying it in landfill.
Ok, not landfill but deep holes in the ground, but then that's a fun subject in itself because Greens seem to think this is hard. Medical and food industry waste will be radioactive for thousands of years! OhNoes! Who will guard pots of poop from patients who've been fed 'deadly' radiation as part of their routine diagnostic procedures? So they create elaborate schemes to 'secure' sites when a person with a paintbrush to repaint the "Keep Out!" signs would be cheaper and easier. I guess they could sit on the safety advisory committee if there's ever another Great Vowel Shift and the signs have to be re-written.
But I digress. Another challenge is, of course keeping us supplied with all the radioisotopes used in medicine and industry. Easily created via nuclear alchemy and letting various elements bask in the neutron flux of a warm reactor. Expensive, or impossible to create with a windmill or solar panel.
"Great British Nuclear" - The UK government likes to flag wave - c.f "Great British Railways" https://gbrtt.co.uk/ - they do however forget by harping on about "Great Britain" all the time, they are excluding Northern Ireland. Rest assured, they do remember Northern Ireland when they look for support fro the Unionists MPs for a vote in Westminster.
Now, "Great British Railways" in the case of Northern Ireland is fine as they have a different arrangement - England, Scotland and Wales have to put up with the omnishambles that is the railways
"Now, "Great British Railways" in the case of Northern Ireland is fine as they have a different arrangement - England, Scotland and Wales have to put up with the omnishambles that is the railways"
Wales and Scotland (apart from the mainline services in from England) both have devolved railways, so the two devolved administatrations are working on seeing if they can do as badly as the Department for Transport in England!
"Great British Railways" (whatever it actually is - those spouting the buzzwords don't really seem clear themselves) is actually 'England plus some mainline services into Wales and Scotland'.
Wales - yeah, they run the line along the Marches (there being no direct rail link between North and South Wales without going to England), plus services to Manchester, Birmingham and into Gloucestershire.
Much less so with Scotland - think the Dumfries to Carlisle shuttle is the only service which Scotrail runs into England..
in the case of Northern Ireland is fine as they have a different arrangement
Not really. Trains in NI are run by Translink, which is owned by the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company, which itself operates in much the same way as ScotRail, Transport for Wales & the English operating companies.
Reading the defeatist comments on this thread, it's quite clear that a good proportion of the commentariat think we're a pathetic little country incapable of doing anything, a country that can't organise a pee-up in a brewery, of no interest to anybody, doomed to irrelevance and decline. Perhaps, rather than focusing on the many, many things that could be done better, they might want to stop reading the Guardian, and check out a few statistics from internationally respected sources and they'd find for example that by WTO data we're the fourth largest exporter in the world (hmm: Brexit doomsters, enjoy that number), by all science publications we're third in the world according to Elsevier, for biological sciences fourth. We're lacking a clear benchmark for engineering, but there's a range of different resources that seem to concur that the UK is around fourth in the world, even health care you might choose not to believe it, but we're easily in the global top ten. I could go on, but clearly there's some very closed minds struggling to function around these parts. Maybe those for whom any pride or ambition is just toooo much could unite and create a sort of retreat for perennial and incurable miserablists?
Coming back to the topic, what's the chance of any of these nuclear ambitions happening? Well there I'm with you, it isn't looking likely to happen. This report identifies what needs to happen and should happen now. In reality, our idle MPs have stuffed off on their two month summer holidays, so nothing will be even thought about until the first week of September. Within a month they'll then clear off again for nearly another month for the party conference season. Then they'll dither, obfuscate, deny and lie to avoid any hard decisions, and so the cycle goes on. If there's one thing they could do to help progress, it would be to get some branding irons, and apply them to the staff of the Office for Nuclear Regulation, and sear "Find solutions, not problems" onto their foreheads.
>” If there's one thing they could do to help progress, it would be to get some branding irons, and apply them to the staff of the Office for Nuclear Regulation, and sear "Find solutions, not problems" onto their foreheads.”
It would easier if Westminster actually terminated HS2 (“sunk cost circa£8bn) allocated the HS2 budget (ie. Circa £130bn in 2023 money) and gav the.ONR the authority to get on with it.
Trouble is that would require politicians to eat humble pie over HS2 and only get to announce investment in new nuclear once, instead of as at present repeatedly making promises of investment, making small investments, delaying signing of contracts etc. etc.
There are reasons why this country is in the top few for a number of those things, and I do actually agree with you that there can be a lot of biased reporting in the Grauniad (which is why I pick it as a source of news, not the source of news). Most of those reasons are historical. For example, Britain built its wealth (and empire) on being a trading nation, and, given our geography and location in the world, we really should be playing to our strengths. Erecting barriers to trade with our nearest neighbours, whilst crowing about trade with the other side of the world seems a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face, though. As for our health service; well, yes indeed, the NHS is very good, and a very cost-effective and egalitarian system. Worth remembering that it is, at its heart, a highly socialist endeavour and dwell on that. It has survived (so far) despite private capital, and politicians in the pay of private capital, from both main parties (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, I'm looking at you), trying to carve bits off it for profit. Don't think we've forgotten "PPP"
The important thing, of course, is not how well the UK is doing by various metrics, but how those metrics are changing. I'd be deeply surprised to learn, for example, that our trade is better now than it was in 2016. I know for a fact that many great scientific research departments at universities have been hit hugely by no longer being able to draw on funding and people from mainland Europe. Scientific research, of course, is one of those areas where international collaboration is not just useful, but vital, if you want to stay ahead of the field.
None of this means, of course, that I am "doing the country down" by pointing these things out. Believe it or not, I actually want the people of this country to he happy, healthy and wealthy. I'd love to be able to point to things we do here and be proud of them. Sadly, it seems that it is our own government is inward-looking and self-destructive, and are essentially "asset-stripping" us all for their own enrichment. I'd like to see some ambition and pride from them, rather than empty phraseology, stamping "Great British" onto of anything that isn't nailed down, and the merry-go-round of empty promises and lies. Sadly, I don't think Keir Starmer will be much better when he gets in next year.
Of course, there are things our government could be doing to actually help the country. The most obvious one to me seems to be investing in renewable energy (and this does include nuclear), and in the technologies this involves, rather than handing out licences to suck up the last dregs of North Sea oil. In 20 years time, we could be at the forefront of the technologies behind solar, wind, and tidal energy, but at the moment the subsidies and tax breaks go to massive multinational fossil-fuel companies. The cynic might point out that our PM's family profits directly from consultancy from those firms, but that would, of course, be tantamount to accusing a Tory of corruption, which is, of course, impossible. If we were genuinely forward-looking, this would, of course, have been done 20 years ago.
Because they don't have enough cash or labourers any more. And won't. They can't keep the trains running, harvest crops, basic pharma is running short, there are no NHS dentists and fewer doctors. They are closing things down to save money across the country. It is unlikely that there is enough cash to finish one nuclear reactor, never mind build any more.
We are an undeveloping third world country now. I guess it is appropriate for political parties to now replace all the lies in their manifestos with 'wishes'. Personally, I wish there was someone to vote for that wasn't going to be complete shite at running a country.
"I wish there was someone to vote for that wasn't going to be complete shite at running a country."
Ah, come on now! In the blue corner, we have a bunch of self-serving tossers led by a globalist stooge with no discernible clear direction (or personality). In the red corner, we have a bunch of self-serving tossers led by a globalist stooge with no discernible clear direction (or personality). How can you claim that we have nobody decent to vote for :)
1. Carry on as now with cars and fossil fuels, it's completely compatible with the 2030 and 2050 deadlines.
2. Sell 100 oil/gas certificates saying it's for energy independence, but energy companies will only be able to start drilling 20 years from now, 10 years from the 2050 deadline.
3. Write a letter to Santa Claus every year between now and 2050 asking for a nuclear power station.
4. While we're at it, 40 new hospitals and a Brexit unicorn for everyone.
5. Starmer will look at each of these proposals carefully before concluding that he has to carry them out as it would be fiscally irresponsible not to.
Anything I missed off?
Sunak’s immediate energy concern is will there be enough power to heat his swimming pool, and will it still be bigger than the one that Boris is also planning on installing at his new abode, just as soon as he's dealt with some Great Crested Newts...
One you've missed - "Cut spending on railways" - because pushing people away from public transport (buses are already a dead loss outside of major cities) clearly makes a lot of sense when trying to reduce emissions. Why invest in decent trains with suitable capacity when you can reduce services, run trains which are too short, and generally let the trains fall apart, so that everyone who can takes the car?
The trains are not run by the govt. Right now trains are VERY expensive and not running very well due to strikes.
If I want to go to London it costs over £70 on the train OR I can drive and park up for ~£30, increasing by £12.50 soon as my car is not ULEZ.
If I go there with my OH the train cost would be £140 but the driving cost is still ~£30.
That £100+ saving goes very nicely towards a nice supper.
Perhaps something as vital as rail infrastructure should be run by the government, that way train companies wouldn't need to receive bailouts from the government, make only the minimum legal investment, and sell tickets at a higher price all just to make a profit to distribute to shareholders.
(Idem water.)
By the way, the London ULEZ requirements are Euro 3 (2000) for motorbikes, Euro 4 (2005) for petrol cars and Euro 6 (2014) for diesel cars. Judging by the response to press coverage over ULEZ, it seems most people will be surprised to learn they do have a vehicle which meets those standards after all.
@Dan 55
"Perhaps something as vital as rail infrastructure should be run by the government"
One of the most vital requirements for life is food. Why dont we privatise food? Growing, delivery, selling, processing, packing, etc? Because we dont want to starve to death.
"that way train companies wouldn't need to receive bailouts from the government, make only the minimum legal investment, and sell tickets at a higher price all just to make a profit to distribute to shareholders."
So why bother giving them money from government then? And why bother setting a minimum legal investment? Just let them sink as companies until someone buys it out and runs it effectively at a rational price.
So why bother giving them money from government then? And why bother setting a minimum legal investment? Just let them sink as companies until someone buys it out and runs it effectively at a rational price.
They already tried that in the US and it didn't work.
Long ago the railways were not under government ownership and we had the greatest network of pretty much anywhere. And then the govt took over, chopped the routes (which admittedly created the opportunity for preservation railways, so not ALL bad) and the service slowly got worse and worse. Dirty old slam-door carriages and smokey worn out diesels. Oh and piles of crap on the tracks from the toilets... Yum!
At least you had a guards van on the old trains. I used to take my bike on the train and it was a doddle.
So then they privatised it in probably the stupidest and most complex way possible, somehow managed to make the service worse but at least with slightly newer trains, and now whine that no-one uses it.
It always ran at a loss under BR so why the heck did they think it could make profit in private ownership?
The bad service under BR shifted people to their cars and the poor service now keeps them there.
My car is only 9 years too old to qualify :)
The war ruined the railways.
The rush to Diesel was not carried out well. Too many rushed designs. Not enough with SVT or CSVT in them
APT was cancelled too early, it would have worked.
BR was saved by the backup project, which is still nicer than the latest stuff.
HAHA!!! The Sulzers had their place.
Agreed, the APT was the pioneer that we killed too soon. The HST was good and much nicer than the old diesel loco hauled trains. Also quiet (not from the outside!) compared to the modern DMU rolling stock. I don't know what happened but seat design as taken a major dive in the last 20 years.
The HST / BR Mk3 carriages were the pinnacle of development in this country, in terms of how well they ride. Very little since has come close, and much of it is a lot worse (the modern trend for lightweight inside-frame bogies probably doesn't help).
The Pendolinos are technically very good and reliable, and they do ride quite well, but the compromises to fit tilting trains into the UK loading gauge make them pretty claustrophobic to travel on. At least they are currently in the process of replacing the awful original seats which some which are a bit better.
Starting to get somewhat off topic :)
The UK loading gauge is an issue. It is really rather small compared to the rest of the world and especially the US.
http://class66.railfan.nl/photo/20068864-044a.htm
OK, these are not UK bound class 66's cos they have the much needed aircon units on top. But look how small they are compared to the US size loco. And the 66 is not small.
https://vajiramias.com/current-affairs/worlds-first-electrified-rail-tunnel-for-running-double-stack-containers/5f1e49981d5def7de792df14/
Then you look at a US double stack container train compared to the size of the loco.
The US has not embraced concrete sleepers as I believe the trains break them due to the axle loading. They still love their (often rotten) wooden ties and nailing the track to them. No wonder they derail so often.
Perhaps something as vital as rail infrastructure should be run by the government, that way train companies wouldn't need to receive bailouts from the government
You mean that instead of having private profit-making companies that are overseen by an incompetent regulator, the government should just let the regulator run them? You seriously think that would work? That would be as big a disaster as it was in the pre-privatisaion days of British Rail days. Even ASLEF recognised that: "All the time it was in the public sector, all we got were cuts, cuts, cuts. And today, there are more members in the trade union, more train drivers, and more trains running.".
Letting government run industries invariably costs people far more, for much worse services, because everyone assumes that "don't need to make a profit" can be translated to "don't need to care, there's always tax money to pay for stuff".
The biggest brake on rail services (when they're not in strike) is the ludicrously over-complicated (split-fare tickets, anyone?) and expensive ticket system. So often I've paid 20-60 quid for a ticket on an almost empty train, when an airline-style demand-based system would mean that they could fill all those seats with last-minute tickets at perhaps 5 or 10 quid, and make more money.
"The trains are not run by the govt."
You need to do some research!
The "independent" train operators are all on management contracts, overseen by the Department for Transport. They can't so much as scratch their arses without approval from the DfT / Treasury. Don't be taken in by the pretence that the strikes are a dispute between railway staff and the operating companies: the actual dispute is between the railway staff and the DfT / Government. The operating companies are just getting paid to be the middle-men to keep the heat off the government, but they have no autonomy to actually make decisions.
"Your Prime Minister doesn't take the car.
That's what helicopters are for."
Well, of course! Just like many of the loudest proponents of Net Zero seem to have a liking for private / charter jets. You can't seriously expect them to practise what they preach!
You've also missed "push people back into offices when they can work productively from home" - because those investments in city-centre office space, and privatised public transport (an oxymoron if I've ever seen one) need to keep paying out dividends for your rich party donor.
Despite the fact that one very real, immediate, and pretty simple measure that can be taken to reduce not only greenhouse gas emissions from transport, but also help fix air pollution issues in cities, and give everyone back a bit of free time that would otherwise be spent on commuting, thus allowing them to get more exercise, and have a healthier work/life balance, thus costing the NHS less in treating heart disease, obesity, various stress-related illnesses and so on, would be to allow those who can, and wish to, to work from home.
Thankfully, some employers, such as my own, can see the benefits from this approach. The likes of Alan Sugar (business property landlord extraordinaire) and Jacobus Rees-Moggus hold opposing opinions, but I'd not even want to use those opinions to fertilise fields.
Well - that's because they have a population that demands government action, rather than one which sits there whilst the government funnels our current and future taxes into the hands of private companies for no benefit.
Nuclear is relatively expensive, but only because the safety standards exist (which they effectively don't for FF), and because every plant seems to be designed from the ground up.
We need to make a reactor design that can be deployed repeatedly...
France is run by a very rich ex banker who appears not to care about the little people, similar to the UK.
Most of the French nuclear fleet is a standard design. The UK did manage to standardise some of its fleet with the AGR design. The later AGR stations are relatively close in design.
"We need to make a reactor design that can be deployed repeatedly..."
That's what is being proposed only the design is 60 years old. No new design can get approval as it's 'unproven'. The snake will continue to swallow its tail until something radical happens.
The Chinese are going full bore on LFTR reactor development which could mean they'll file a whole sheaf of patents and own a working embodiment of what was started in the US many years ago.
It may be time to rapidly (within reason) work on several different designs rather than only having the one that's been used for ages. In a decade, look at the pros and cons of all of the built designs and perhaps then look at deploying the top 1 or 2 designs in volume on top of or immediately adjacent to sites that have been decommissioned.
At the same time, encourage power hungry industries (crypto excluded) to locate nearby. Bring in things that can use the waste heat as an input to their process (green houses growing leafy greens in mid-winter). Also look at installing distribution to recharging points for vehicles and train lines.
>>France has domestic elec rates about 2/3rds of the current UK prices
And EDF, 90% owned by the French state, gets to reap profits from the poorly regulated Unicorn Kingdom energy market. Le Kerching! Merci mes choux-fleurs!!!
All together now...
Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé ...!
Hey, les rosbifs, Allez fetcher la CASH!
"It does make particular sense for them, because it is a by-product of rare earth mining."
There would be lots of Rare Earth mining in the US except that Thorium is classed as a radioactive hazardous waste. If you want to get mining concerns running in the opposite direction, just say that phrase. Thorium is always found when pulling up and refining Rare Earth metals. It's all over the place. I believe in China that the government takes possession of excess Thorium and has been stockpiling it in anticipation of the day it will be useful. The US could do the same and store it at the Nevada Proving Grounds as nothing will ever be built there. Satellite views show piles of drums being buried in pits that they don't talk about so the area must be stable enough.
"I've been hearing about the wonders of Thorium cycle reactors for decades. So where are they all?"
The only serious effort being made seems to be in China. Nobody else can make any headway as they can't get approvals for an 'unproven' design. This is, of course, ignoring that the US had a working LFTR some decades ago ready for the next prototype to embody more of the intended final design before it was cancelled. Rumor is that Nixon gave it the axe as it didn't produce weapons material in any useful quantity.
Sure looks that way:
Sunak’s family firm signed a billion-dollar deal with BP before PM opened new North Sea licences
And my thoughts back then were pollution.
Been wanting more nuclear since the late 70s.
Yet here we are turning them off, and wasting expensively imported natural gas in turbines instead,
Aghhh.
As to North Sea gas licences, this I can only approve of if it is used INSTEAD of importing gas, for heating/cooking while we move away from it to a mix of nuclear, and wind/wave.
Don't even like tidal as it would be an ecological disaster to the Severn estuary.
"True. It's all politics and graft. Sunak's playing up the "energy security" aspect of the new licences but it was the Tory government that let Centrica close the gas storage facilities that would have helped out last year."
If you strip the political party bashing out of statements, you'd be right on the mark. They are all a large criminal class intent on lining their own pockets with no consideration for the peasants.
No no - the licenses are to allow private companies to profit from natural resources, nothing to do with the UK gas market.There is no chance of harvesting enough gas to affect global prices, so there will be no change to the cost in the uk.
The oil industry in the UK is already heavily taxed, and being government, it could always decide to apply export taxes or duties to subsidise UK domestic consumption. This of course will duel-fuel the ire of both the US and the EU. One because they want us buying their gas, and the other because we'd benefit from selling to them. Plus producing locally is much greener than importing gas & oil from thousands of miles away.
"The oil industry in the UK is already heavily taxed"
Bwaahhhhaaaaaa
You've clearly not met their accountants.
Shell paid £15m to the UK in 2022
Yes, I know that not all of their profits were made here, but the "windfall" tax was of course provided with a loophole large enough to pull a supertanker through sideways!
>” As to North Sea gas licences, this I can only approve of if it is used INSTEAD of importing gas,”
This like fracking, isn’t about domestic demand but about stimulating investment in the UK and the contribution the exports will make to GDP.
Would not be surprised if exporting all that new North Sea oil and gas will generate the monies necessary for new nuclear etc faster than if they were only used for domestic demand. Obviously, this being the Tories, we know from the 80s and 90s, using the monies for tax cuts etc. will be more important than actually investing in the much needed infrastructure…
The "Dash For Gas" was all about cleaning up generation quickly because of acid rain and sulphur. Coal fired plants were all similar ages and were getting to the later stages of their lifespan. Costs to modernise were high and gas was seen as the miracle fuel, cheap, reliable and not constrained by unions. CCGT has always been cheaper to build because the sites were generally small, no cooling towers or perceived emissions so planners just waved them through. That many are now end of life is also an issue.
Coal was pretty much killed in the 80s so we end up where we are.
Everybody hated them, especially those of us who suffered through the 1970s and the 3 day week. No government could allow a few unions to dictate how the country was run, even Blair realised that when he refused to reverse the strike legislation.
Now we have Lynch and his mob trying again.
"Now we have Lynch"-
Not really.
You would need guys like Lynch in government and not guys like Mogg and similar.
And you would need strong unions "with a high percentage of the workforce unionized and involving a tripartite arrangement, where representatives of labour and employers negotiate wages and labour market policy is mediated by the government."
To quote the Wikipedia on the "Nordic model".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
But instead you have an outdated defunct idiotic political system with a two party system and a one party government kept in place with fptp.
And still a class society, the last in western Europe, with an ever growing wealth and income inequality and poverty.
But you will not all get it, apparently.
PS. Labour here doesn't referre to a political party.
You would need guys like Lynch in government
Fuck no. Train drivers earning 100k/year for a 25 hour week, union leaders getting company Porsches, and the rest of us paying 80% tax?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
That might work for you, but living in that sort of paternalistic "government knows best" society is my idea of hell.
@Potemkine!
"Opposing nuclear and renewable energies is a mistake"
I agree. Thats why I didnt say renewables I said unreliables. Technology that works and is grid ready and economic makes sense and that is why green opposition to nuclear but support for wind/solar has made no sense and wasted a lot of resources. Imagine the money spent on deploying these unready technologies onto the grid going towards energy generation.
"They are complementary and both are required to get away from coil + oil + gas."
Unfortunately unreliables have caused the opposite. Germany and the UK falling back on coal and gas being a requirement to use unreliables on the grid. All of this is before the dream of electrifying everything which is going to require more actual energy generation.
Unfortunately the corner we back ourselves into is nuclear taking so long to deploy and not being cheap so we have to fall back on the old reliable.
Nuclear power plants are without a doubt a technical marvel. Its designs, its complexity, its processes, its safety procedures are truly part of a great human achievement.
However, the problem the nuclear power industry has is that the economics, not the technology, make it outdated. It simply cannot compete on price because construction is so hideously expensive. There was a time private power companies had their own nuclear power plants, then came a time that only governments had enough money to finance them. Now were at a time where even many governments don't have the required funds any more to make it happen. Every time there is a nuclear power incident somewhere on the planet (on average every fifteen years I believe) the cost for new reactors shoots up yet again.
The UK had to get China to fund its latest reactor and could only get the Chinese to sign the contract in return for a strike price twice the current wholesale electricity price, guaranteed for 30 years! While the trend on the wholesale electric is only downward. That means that in ten years we'd probably be paying the Chinese four times the wholesale price, in twenty years ten times the wholesale price. It means that nuclear power plants are essentially running on subsidies to produce reliable baseload. It's financial madness to overpay so much just for reliability and it opens up the economics for alternative systems of reliability (batteries of all kinds for instance) to grossly undercut nuclear power.
Even France, easily the world champion in using nuclear power to fulfil its demand, is investing in wind power like it's going out of fashion because the economics of nuclear are starting to hold them back.
Nuclear is on course to drop out of the top five cheapest ways to produce electricity and I see no way it can compete with, for instance, solar and wind power which, all things considered, are becoming insanely cheap. I don't see how nuclear could ever become cheaper than those two again. There's something to be said for nuclear to power submarines, perhaps even spaceships, but not countries any more. I think that ship has sailed.
Where is this insanely cheap wind and solar electricity?
People in France currently pay ~20c per kWh, Germany is ~40c and in the UK I'm paying 30p. Of those 3 countries Germany has the highest % of renewables in the mix and France the lowest.
We've seen recently investment backing out of wind farms as it is becoming 'too expensive'.
At the moment the Western European day ahead prices are pretty equal (change to Europe mode at the top then click show averaged countries at the bottom right). Northern European day ahead prices are low as usual. Do you have another source?
I'm talking household prices, not wholesale. I know we're getting royally screwed as wholesale prices have come down a lot.
https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity/tariffs
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/household-energy-prices-germany-continue-fall-remain-high-early-2023
We're also getting the shaft in terms of extras added to bills.
https://electricitycosts.org.uk/electricity-bill-charges/
(I know this is from 2020!)
Nearly 25% to the govt for social and environmental. One of those things where we pay he govt money so they can give it back to us with a chunk missing.
The margin for the actual supplier is tiny.
The environmental and social tariffs is basically payments needed now to cover the damage done in years gone past when the overlooked (my most charitable take) costs (externalities) of using coal etc were not actually reflected in the price.
"One of those things where we pay he govt money so they can give it back to us with a chunk missing."
Oh, it's not missing, it's been given to some mob to pay for managing those programs. Management firms with very top heavy org charts of highly compensated executives.
In Los Angeles they hired a consultancy firm to come up with "low cost" housing to warehouse the homeless. They've come up with small flats costing $600,000ea. To the north of LA there are cities where a modest home sells for half that. Either way, those residences will have to be replaced every 4-5 years if they stick homeless people in them. I've seen first hand what people do to that sort of housing. A really hot fire may not kill all of the bacteria. Seattle was spending somewhere on the order of $80,000/year/homeless person for subsistence support. They could have spent much less and simply required people in the program to pass a drug/alcohol test every couple of weeks to keep getting money. Good for one year and then they'd either be cut off for several years or would be placed in long term care if they couldn't take care of themselves.
In the UK the price of renewable electricity is linked to the price of electricity generated by gas. If the price of gas goes up, the price of wind and solar generation goes up the same (it's called Contracts for Difference). It's done this way to give the companies who build the windmills a return on their investment that's in line with the short-term expectations of the stock market and is a crap way to manage essential national infrastructure.
The companies are backing out because their costs are going up but the CfDs are fixed and they won't make as much money as quickly as they want to.
In the UK the price of renewable electricity is linked to the price of electricity generated by gas.
Wrong. But of course this is what the 'renewables' parasites would want you to believe. If this were true, when gas prices were low, our electricity costs would have been much, much lower. The real reason electricity prices are high is because CfDs are based on marginal prices, ie to support the most expensive operator.. namely 'renewables'. So when gas prices rose due to governments banning Russian oil & gas, gas became the benchmark, and 'renewables' profitted massively because gas isn't one of their input costs.
And of course any sucker with a fake '100% renewable' tariff didn't see any benefit, even though their energy is allegedly the greenest, cheapest and non-reliant on imported gas service..
For the 900th time, Jellied Eel, you are wrong.
Generation prices follow marginal rates, and as gas is the marginal fuel, windmills and nukes charge at the same rate as gas - because they can.
But we have all given up explaining this to you because you never listen.
Generation prices follow marginal rates, and as gas is the marginal fuel, windmills and nukes charge at the same rate as gas - because they can.But we have all given up explaining this to you because you never listen.
Ah, that royal 'we' again. I'm sure if you are correct, then you can provide me with a link or three that shows gas being the benchmark. Sure, for a few months the bans on cheap gas did allow wind farmers to sell at gas rates, but wind and solar as still the most expensive forms of generation by far.
Again this should be obvious to even the dumbest politician, or voter. The more we've 'invested' in 'renewables', the more expensive our electricity has become. At the same time, the 'renewables' lobby tries to convince people that their product is the cheapest and we should be throwing billions more into their pockets. It's understandable why people are confused when morons like this-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66359093
The truth about heat pumps and the power needed to run them
...And there is another issue.
Unit for unit, electricity typically costs three times as much as gas.
After glossing over the issues of needing to spend a lot of money on a heat pump, new radiatiors, and you'll need something else to make hot water. And they won't work very efficiently, if at all if outside air temperatures fall much below freezing. Like they have this strange and annoying habit of doing every winter. But then of course comes the big lie-
So, to get to net zero in time, the government has set an ambitious target - decarbonise the entire electricity supply by 2035.
The UK has been making great progress with offshore wind, but building wind turbines at sea is expensive.
The cheapest renewable power is from onshore wind and solar.
Many experts say the UK will need thousands of much cheaper wind turbines on land.
I'm sure whenever Rowlett isn't being jetted off to Alicante to inform viewers that Spain is hot in summer, he lives in some luxurious house in London and can afford to 'invest' in Green crap thanks to his generous Bbc salary and side-gigs. Vattenfall announced they can't deliver at their agreed contractual strike price, which highlights one of the lies about wind and solar being the cheapest. They're whining that their costs have been increasing not decreasing, even though their contracts are indexed.
Then there's the small point that the 2035 target is entirely optional, and any government can change the date. Same as the 2050 target. Or it could repeal the Climate Change Act. Or there's the bigges obvious lie.
Rowlett and his fellow travellers keep telling us we're facing 'extreme' weather, and it's here now! If so, why does he think it's a great idea to waste so much money on stuff that's entirely dependent on prevailing weather conditions? Sure climate predictions give various contradictory outcomes, like more storms, or less wind, more cloud or less cloud. Either of which affect wind and solar output and can even destroy wind and solar farms.
But the biggest lie is that it'll make any difference. Even if the UK ends up 'zero carbon', it will make no (ok, an statistically insignificant) to either UK or 'global' temperatures.
From government website on Contracts for Difference
"Successful developers of renewable projects enter into a private law contract with the Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC), a government-owned company. Developers are paid a flat (indexed) rate for the electricity they produce over a 15-year period; the difference between the ‘strike price’ (a price for electricity reflecting the cost of investing in a particular low carbon technology) and the ‘reference price’ (a measure of the average market price for electricity in the GB market)."
In 2020 gas was, at ~30%, the largest single generator of UK electricity but as UCL say "Natural gas is the main driver of electricity prices across Europe confirms research published by UCL. Despite gas providing under half of the total electricity in the UK, in recent years it set electricity costs 84% of the time."
and
"While renewables are providing more and more electricity, we still need natural gas to meet the demand. The most expensive natural gas producers are still needed to cope with fluctuations in renewable energy production, so they are setting what’s called the marginal cost, at the edge of what’s needed. Because natural gas generation is expensive, those producers charge the highest prices – which means that other producers are also able to charge similar prices."
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/sep/electricity-prices-dictated-gas-producers-who-provide-less-half-uk-electricitys
Pick a time, any time, and draw incorrect conclusions. How very climate change.. Your link's broken, but from the press release-
Professor Michael Grubb (UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources), who is leading the research, said: “Fossil fuels used to be cheaper than renewable energy sources, but that has turned on its head as gas prices shot up and the cost to produce renewables such as wind and solar power has plummeted.
So thanks to the self-inflicted 'energy crisis' and bans on Russian oil and gas, yes, gas prices did shoot up. But now they've fallen again, unlike our energy prices. Again it doesn't explain why our electricity bills have shot up as we've "invested" £200bn in 'renewables'. Surely if the cost of wind and solar has plummeted then our bills should also be plummeting?
Ok, so the situation is more complex. Given wind & solar are occasional generators-
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind
minimum: 0.189 GW maximum: 13.247 GW average: 6.266 GW
Something else has to pick up the slack. That's been gas, which has meant that our 'renewables' policy increased our dependency on gas and made the 'energy crisis' that much worse. Plus by relegating gas generation to stand-by capacity, costs have to be spread across their limited operating hours, again artificially inflating the cost/price of gas generated electricity.
Oh, and also from the press release-
The two papers are the first outputs of a programme of research led by UCL supported by the Aldersgate Group and the Institute for New Economic Thinking
So your basic sponsored research to greenwash for lobbying groups-
https://www.aldersgategroup.org.uk/aims/
The Group is focused on ensuring that the UK’s climate and environmental targets translate into measures that are environmentally effective and that grow affordable investment in low carbon infrastructure, products and services.
https://www.aldersgategroup.org.uk/membership/organisations/
The 'renewables' blob is, of course well represented.. Well, maybe not. I did wonder what Theresa May had been up to since she left politics.
The rules are neatly summarised right here.https://assets.elexon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/28171453/p135att1.pdf
Though with your mind already made up it matters little for anyone else to try and explain them.
Err.. wow. You found a thing! Somehow! Curious what your search term was that threw up a change proposal from 2003 for one small, but significant aspect of the energy market. Especially when-
This paper has been prepared by the Transmission Company to support BSC Modification Proposals “Marginal Definition of the ‘main’ energy imbalance price” and “Marginal SBP during periods of Demand Reduction”
and-
https://www.elexon.co.uk/mod-proposal/p135-marginal-system-buy-price-during-periods-of-demand-reduction/
Progression
The BSC Panel recommended that the Proposed Modification should not be made. The Authority rejected the Proposed Modification on 26 September 2003.
and the decision letter explaining the reasoning is here-
https://assets.elexon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/28171453/decisionletterfinal.pdf
Imbalance settlement ensures that any electricity not covered by contracts is paid for at, or charged at, a cost reflective price to target the costs that NGC has incurred in undertaking actions to match generation and demand (“Electricity Balancing”) onto those Parties who are in imbalance, i.e. those Parties on whose behalf the SO has taken Electricity Balancing actions.
and is again one of those market rigging mechanisms. 'Renewables' scumbags, being providers of variable and intermittent electricity are more likely to find themselves out of balance due to the vagueries of the weather. It's also why there's so much pressure to waste money on batteries because they make millions from providing balancing services when there's a supply/demand imbalance. But the letter also contains some fun predictions-
In any Settlement Period during which demand control occurs, the SO will have accepted all feasible Offers, which potentially may be at very high prices, before a period of demand control is instructed. The majority of the PSMG considered that a marginal SBP in the region of £99,999 could be feasible.
Again why battery farmers are so keen to exploit marginal SBPs because as we've added more 'renewables', system stability has decreased, as have requirements for demand controls. It predicted that buyers left short could go bankrupt, and they have.. Although most of those have been bailed out by other energy customers, eg Bulb's bankruptcy. There are also other scams, like when wind output exceeds demand, wind farmers get paid millions in constraint payments to not supply electricity and unbalance the grid. Normally where you have supply, and no demand, the product has no value. But 'renewables' economics are special like that. Then there's preferrential or priority market access, which means wind sets the price and as everyone's seen, their electricty bills keep rising.
But I have an open mind, unlike you.. And I also question, or dare I say it 'fact check' the explanations given because often, they are utter BS as you've so clearly demonstrated. Now, would you like to try again and explain why, despite 'renewables' costs allegedly plummetting, our bills have been rocketting?
Jellied,
One also has to look at the unsubsidized costs for wind/solar. It's not always reported and often the numbers presented don't make the distinction. All industries get some sort of subsidy, which is a big part of the problem, but wind/solar have been given some very big handouts and when those credits and tax abatements expire, the farms become unprofitable and often wind up getting scrapped. Some councils have been sucked into the whole renewables scam and lost their shirts since the people on the councils aren't often highly experienced business people. They don't ask the questions that are needed to evaluate an investment in something like a solar farm. Panorama just did a story about that, but it took some reading to get to the things they didn't cover when wasting their time trying to chase somebody and ask them questions they weren't going to answer.
Steady rates are more important that rates that are tracking the market. When there is excess 'profits', they should go into savings to balance the times when costs are higher. There also needs to be more investment in the grid as well. People keep breeding and better ways to manage power keep coming out. At the most basic level, the grid needs to keep up with the population. It also has to keep up with where that population shifts and be able to service industry so it's possible for new firms to come to the country.
Panorama just did a story about that, but it took some reading to get to the things they didn't cover when wasting their time trying to chase somebody and ask them questions they weren't going to answer.
I'm guessing that was about the Thurrock (et al) fiasco? There have been a lot of issues like that, eg Nottingham and 'Robin Hood Energy'. Or just councils and landowners being left to deal with the mess when some wind & solar farms are abandoned and they're left with the remediation costs. That's also been a problem for investment funds like pensions because the way these projects are structured, the revenues/subsidy streams are often spun out into an SPV the developers can flog off to the gullible. It's the usual PFI routine where profits are privatised, costs are socialised.
Steady rates are more important that rates that are tracking the market. When there is excess 'profits', they should go into savings to balance the times when costs are higher. There also needs to be more investment in the grid as well. People keep breeding and better ways to manage power keep coming out. At the most basic level, the grid needs to keep up with the population. It also has to keep up with where that population shifts and be able to service industry so it's possible for new firms to come to the country.
Yep, that's a massive general problem. Population increase, that places more demand on services, service capacity isn't increased and service quality takes a sharp nosedive. Personally, I think natural monopolies should be public because otherwise there's zero incentive to keep costs down. That's been demonstrated in situations like Macquarrie asset-stripping Thames Water then abandoning it, to our insane energy market. Companies like National Grid love 'renewables' because it means we have to make massive 'investments' in grid upgrades, which they manage and profit from. It's a classic example of regulatory capture that we're all paying for now.
Policy decisions really don't help either. Sure, everyone will be forced to go all-electric to hit self-imposed 'Net Zero' targets. Ok, so that means upgrading the supply to every home so they can run heatpumps, electric coookers and charge their cars. Which means thousands of substations and cabling will need upgrading, which is a collosal civils job.. Especially when I'm guessing most of the substations don't have the physical space to install more kit, especially in parallel prior to a cutover.
"I'm guessing that was about the Thurrock (et al) fiasco? "
Yes, that's the one I just saw.
I don't want to see the utilities become public (government run). Too many games are played in politics and the utilities would wind up getting managed by relatives of politicians with no way to fire them unless they can be convicted of a serious crime. Shear incompetence in a government post is par for the course rather than a reason for sacking. Budgets that should be sequestered for improvements will wind up getting reassigned to pork barrel projects, pension funds will be robbed, etc.
Lengthy diatribe from one who has already decided the answer and won’t listen. I shall keep the explanation simple as you’re clearly one of these types that lives off trying to discredit one’s opponents with cock and bull. You should be a politician!
Bills skyrocketed? Gas price.
Reliance on imports (net importer since 2008).
Putin.
Ukraine.
Marginal prices track the price of the thing you cannot do without.
Wholesale pricing not passed back onto consumers.
And, as you have kindly explained over and over, you can’t live without gas when there is not enough of the alternatives available.
Whether the change proposal I flagged was or was not accepted, the rules were nonetheless neatly flagged there not my fault if you don’t understand. Or indeed my responsibility to educate.
Lengthy diatribe from one who has already decided the answer and won’t listen. I shall keep the explanation simple as you’re clearly one of these types that lives off trying to discredit one’s opponents with cock and bull. You should be a politician!
So.. let me get this right. You made a bunch of posts simply stating I was wrong. Then you somehow found a very ancient response to a proposed change to the balancing mechanims, which is just one element of the UK's energy market. You then claimed this was 'proof' that gas sets the UK electricity cost, even though it doesn't, and to make matters even more amusing, the proposal you cited was rejected.
So why did you cherry pick that one? Was there actually some point you were trying to make? As for the rest of your 'argument'-
Bills skyrocketed? Gas price.Reliance on imports (net importer since 2008).
Really sums it up. Electricty bills were skyrocketing before the SMO. This has been driven by the high cost of 'renewables'. Because 'renewables' are intermittent, unreliable and very expensive, we increased our dependency on gas.
Because gas and coal are bad, even though we can produce them ourselves, we reduced investment and actually created disincentives to invest in domestic gas production. Having massively increased our dependency on gas, we then decided to ban oil & gas imports when the SMO started. We never really bought much Russian gas, but because of the 'market', gas prices shot up. Then, because of the way our energy market is rigged, gas became more expensive than 'renewables', and 'renewables' generated massive profits. Ok, and so did our gas sector because we have LNG terminals and the EU doesn't.
This temporary situation allowed the 'renewables' PR scumbags, like the Bbc to claim 'wind is 7x cheaper than gas!', but only because of those unique market conditions. Now, the price of gas has fallen back to around pre-SMO levels, as has the wholesale price of electricity.. Yet for some reason, the retail price has not. And even though the energy 'crisis' has been one entirely caused by 'renewables' policy, the idiots in charge seem determined to make the situation even worse by pissing even more of our money into the wind.
Nuclear or modern coal would provide baseload capacity, gas could smooth out demand spikes, and our energy would be a whole lot cheaper and more secure. Oh, and watch this-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsCwZu3nvoM
which explains how the whole crumbling edifice is based on faked data..
Rubbish. How does adding renewables to the network increase dependency on gas. Without renewables you are burning more gas to make up the lack of renewables, all of the time.
Coal is dead and not coming back. Get over it. Gas isn't terrible, but it's not great especially when it has to be shipped half way round the world; and traded in competition with many other users. The UK's demand cannot be covered by the North Sea anymore, even with the new round of Rishi's licensing. Permanent trade deficit on electricity is not sustainable, because borrowing dependency.
I will therefore ask you, do you have another plan that adds up? New nuke plus lots of new wind and interconnectors is the current governments plan. It's a plan, and I can find things wrong with it. But it is a plan. Market mechanics being favourable to "the renewables lobby" is a symptom of the "renewables lobby" being in cahoots with government ministers to print money. This is the VERY problem I would see eliminated from the BS that is NETTA if I were in charge.
Wind IS cheaper at wholesale no matter how many times you try and deny this, and there is ample evidence of it. What is also evident is that consumer pricing of wind is entirely at the mercy of gas. I have no problem with more nuclear, but I think you will find that building lots of it is an instant general-election loser; as it has been for the last 5 decades. It's also rather pricey per kWh.
I can only assume you have skin in the game and an agenda of your own to push to be so obstinate in the face of the blindingly obvious evidence across the board.
Regarding citing youtube as a source, I think I will stick to peer reviewed papers, industry sources and respected academics. As you seem to have time on your hands; can I recommend Dieter Helm's excellent series? Good background listening for work.
Rubbish. How does adding renewables to the network increase dependency on gas. Without renewables you are burning more gas to make up the lack of renewables, all of the time.
You.. really don't understand any of this, do you? Again it's pretty simple. Wind is intermittent and unreliable. Electricity needs to be extremely reliable, and stable. This again shows the problem-
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind
Wind minimum: 0.189 GW maximum: 13.247 GW average: 6.266 GW
CCGT minimum: 2.253 GW maximum: 15.146 GW average: 8.289 GW
Nuclear minimum: 2.292 GW maximum: 5.31 GW average: 4.186 GW
Although the graph illustrates the point better for nuclear. Build 1GW nuclear, get 1GWh 24x7x365. When there's no wind, we need to burn gas. If we just burned gas, we could have a gas powerstation that of 1GW that produced 720GWh a month. The costs of building and running that plant are easier to model because it can be run at peak efficiency. Instead, demands on CCGT are at the mercy of the weather, so costs have to be spread across an unknown number of operating (ie saleable) hours. If you can generate & sell 720GWh a month, you can spread those costs, if you're only allowed to sell 20GWh, the cost of that electricity is obviously going to be a lot higher.
This was (or should have been) an obvious problem when DECC published their first levelised cost model. Gas cost (from memory) £60/MWh, Wind cost £120/MWh. That should have raised the obvious question that if gas (and even nuclear) was so much cheaper than wind, why TF are we wasting money building windmills? Answer of course is the mythical warming properties of CO2.
Coal is dead and not coming back. Get over it.
Tell that to Germany, Poland, India, China etc etc. Especially Germany given they're desperately building new coal stations to burn dirty/less efficient brown coal, when the UK is still sitting on massive piles of the good stuff. Germany's slowly waking up to the impacts of it's energewiend 'strategy' as it rapidly de-industrialises and it's economy slides into recession due to high energy costs. Other countries are of course committing to new nuclear because it's by far and away the most efficient zero-carbon power source. There are also other effects of lobbying and regulatory capture. The objective in the Climate Change Act was to reduce carbon emissions by 30%. Modern coal power stations can do this because they're more efficient than the ones we built in the '50s and '60s.
Of course the Greens say 'no', because the believe the best solution is going back to pre-Industrial technology and ignoring all the problems we already know came from the 'Age of Sail'.
Wind IS cheaper at wholesale no matter how many times you try and deny this, and there is ample evidence of it.
Again you're confusing beliefs with facts. This belief was promoted when the likes of Vattenfall pitched a wind farm at a low-ball price of (from memory) £39/MWh. Now, they're saying they can't deliver at that price and need even more subsidies. Again the lie should be obvious to anyone outside the 'renewables' industry that the more we've added wind & solar capacity to the network, the more our bills have increased. If this crap really was cheap, then if your're right, our bills should have been falling.
ps.. You mentioned Dieter Helm. This is especially amusing given you ovbviously haven't met him, nor have you read one of his first books on this subject-
In his book The Carbon Crunch (2012) and in print media, Dieter Helm criticised efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through current regulation and government intervention, and the deployment of renewable energy, particularly wind power.
I recommend you actually read it, along with Net Zero. He's written widely about the problems and costs with relying on 'renewables'.
I can't find anything online promising me cheaper electricity if I switch to a "green" trariff with some level of renewable. There were cheap deals when they first came out, loss-leaders to sign people up, but they all disappeared and in a couple of cases the companies went bust in the last 12 months or so due to the gas crisis. I don't think anyone's lied to me. I can go on suppliers' websites and price comparison websites and see the tariffs myself - and that's what I do. Some examples:
Which? UK says (July 23) "Three energy companies were given exemptions from the price cap on default energy tariffs because they proved to energy regulator Ofgem that they have higher costs because they support renewables,"
The same report says "In addition, some companies let you ‘top-up’ your tariff, which essentially means you pay more for additional green features. This could be increasing the proportion of renewable electricity you pay for or adding green gas or carbon offset."
Which? also says (Jul 23) "This [green] tariff is a good option if: you are concerned about the environmental impact of your gas and electricity use. Green tariffs aren't always more expensive. You should watch out for: some green tariffs charge higher than average prices. Look carefully at what the tariff entails, as some have more direct environmental benefits than others.
The money saving expert site says "There is a fully renewable electricity and gas tariff – but it's super expensive.." and "..clearly it is only for those for whom being green is the most important factor."
A quick search for "gov.uk renewable energy cheap cheaper prices" doesn't come back with any UK gov propoganda telling me that renewable energy is cheaper, just some interesting stuff about the %generation of the various types and stuff on getting money to insulate the house and an ofgem report from 2014 talking about green energy messaging.
The Green Party (UK) says: Why is Ecotricity more expensive than non-green alternatives? Is green energy more expensive?
A: Over the years, green energy has become the most economical form of energy available. We hope that it will become even more so, and that we continue to see more and more sources of green energy being built over the next few years. For Ecotritiy, though, they cannot both build a green grid for Britain and be the cheapest energy supplier on the market. The expense of your bill is an investment in wind farms, sun parks and green gas mills. You may find that green energy tariffs are slightly more expensive than standard energy tariffs. This is because it can cost a bit more to produce renewable energy and our energy infrastructure is not 100% integrated with them yet. But, we know that as wholesale renewable energy costs drop, so do the cost of green energy tariffs. It is Green Party Policy to work towards creating the regulations to expedite this, including ending subsidies for fossil fuels.
But, for me, it doesn't matter because if I were looking for a "green" tariff then the price wouldn't be a primary discriminator. I've honestly never assumed or believed that renewable energy is/should/would/could be cheaper than other energy. The only reason I would assume that anyone would sign up for a renewable tariff is because they want to reduce the amount of CO2. Same with electric cars - if I were to buy one it would be because of CO2, not purchase price or running costs.
Here are several sources touting the wind and solar are cheaper line line:
https://twitter.com/GreenpeaceUK/status/1573923714139299842
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62892013
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/renewables-cheapest-form-power
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2022/html/ecb.sp221116~c1d5160785.en.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/01/kwasi-kwartengs-stand-for-green-energy-isnt-everything-but-it-helps
https://fullfact.org/economy/green-party-manifesto-renewable-energy/
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/september/net-zero-cheaper-and-greener-than-continuing-use-fossil-fuels.html
All those links talk about costs, not prices. Why would I, as a consumer, be interested in costs? It costs ~£10 to make a pair of jeans but I don't expect to pay that for a pair of Levis in the shops.
But - renewables and green tariffs are not about price, they are about CO2. We're going to have to pay what it costs; if it works out cheaper then great, but if not then that's tough.
Careful, the wheels on the goalposts are leaving marks :)
The first one states 'lower bills'
The second one 'could save trillions'
The third one (admittedly you have to read the full report) 'bringing unprecedented benefits for consumers'
fifth one ' renewables would work better than fracking in bringing bills down.'
last one 'save the world trillions in future energy costs, giving us a cleaner, cheaper and more energy secure future'
Lower, save, benefits for consumers, bills down, cheaper...
By what you're saying the consumer's bills are going to stay the same or go up while the cost of production goes down which means more profit for the energy companies. Aren't we in the middle of a debate about greedflation with banks and oil companies posting record profits?
If these people are not trying to sell wind and solar to the end consumer then who are they selling it to?
"By what you're saying the consumer's bills are going to stay the same or go up while the cost of production goes down..."
Nope. I'm saying - third time now - it's not about price, it's about reducing CO2. None of the companies that sell energy to consumers are telling me that renewables are cheaper. I don't feel lied to. None of the links you posted are from companies that sell energy to consumers so, while they might be interesting, they aren't any more relevant to me when I'm looking to buy leccy than an article about 14 year old girls in India turning out jeans for £10 would be if I were in the market for a new pair of Levis. You might be pissed off about electricity not being as cheap as the BBC or the Guardian says it should be, but I'm not.
Why would I, as a consumer, be interested in costs? It costs ~£10 to make a pair of jeans
Because you, as a supposedly sophisticated consumer, should know that there's a fundamental relationship between cost, and price.
But - renewables and green tariffs are not about price, they are about CO2. We're going to have to pay what it costs
Well, not really. If the objective is to reduce CO2 emissions, then we could achieve that ambition by building nuclear. Or even replacing our vintage coal power stations with modern ones that can reduce emissions by the required 30% (or more) simply by being better designs. Kingsnorth tried that, so Greenpeace flew in a climate 'scientist' to object, and that replacement was scrapped. We don't have to pay the costs demanded by the 'renewables' lobby when cheaper and more reliable alternatives are available.
As for CO2, that's really for believers in homeopathy. So some simple "science"-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve
The measurements collected at Mauna Loa Observatory show a steady increase in mean atmospheric CO2 concentration from 313 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in March 1958 to 406 ppmv in November 2018, with a current increase of 2.48 ± 0.26 (mean ± 2 std dev) ppmv CO2 per year
Dogma 101. What is the precise relationship between CO2, and temperature?
So picking from various wiki pages, because they're well known to be the most accurate and reliable sources for climate info.. Humans account for around 50 Gt CO2 per year. Each part per million of CO2 in the atmosphere represents approximately 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon, or 7.82 gigatonnes of CO2.
UK produces around 347.84Mt, or 0.347Gt, or 0.044ppm CO2.
Then assume a climate change of 1.5C based on the good'ol post-Industrial revolution increase in CO2 from around 275ppmv to 440ppmv. You get 0.009C per ppm. Ok, it's a little more complicated than that because the relationship is theoretically non-linear. But achieving 'Net Zero' would reduce global temperatures by around.. precisely fsck all. At a cost of a few trillion. Small price for someone else to pay to save the planet though?
You can also test this scientifically by building a greenhouse, raising the CO2 level by 1ppmv at the time and observing the thermal runaway. Well, in reality you'd need to be there a very long time with very sensitive instruments to note any significant change. Or you just cheat, as climate 'scientists' do and use tubes with a few thousand ppmv and show candles dimming or something. Just one of the many presentation 'tricks' utilised by climate charlatans.
Much depends on what you take “cheaper” to mean. I suspect like the words on the side of the Brexit bus, much depends on the reader misreading what is being said.
Given energy prices have been going up for decades and will continue to increase in real terms, cheaper means cheaper than they would have otherwise been.
So in the current environment, the contribution renewables make to our electricity supply, means we (as a nation) are not importing so much [expensive) gas, hence our bills are “cheaper” than they would have been without the renewable contribution…
If you think renewables will actually result in you paying less in real terms tomorrow for grid supplied electricity than you paid yesterday then you are fooling yourself.
@Headley_Grange
"People don't buy renewable energy because it's cheap, they buy it because they want to reduce the amount of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere."
Wish environmentalists especially in government would agree with that. Would be great to watch all these virtuous people actually pay for their expensive energy instead of forcing the rest of us to pay for it. Of course those virtuous people would be paying for the gas when unreliables dont supply enough.
Wish environmentalists especially in government would agree with that. Would be great to watch all these virtuous people actually pay for their expensive energy instead of forcing the rest of us to pay for it. Of course those virtuous people would be paying for the gas when unreliables dont supply enough.
This message was brought to you in association with NetZeroWatch. A 55 Tufton Street inspired production.
*The story, characters, and opinions portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, facts or science is intended or should be inferred.
In my case, I produce my own renewables. Demand from the wider system from my house was Zero, including at night.
While not everyone can do that, appropriate tax breaks e.g. employee benefit schemes would be a very, very sensible way to make inroads into demand reduction.
Of course, demand reduction is against the agenda of the big 6 and their lobbyists.
Witness the media ridicule of Insulate UK, despite it being blindingly obvious that if large numbers of properties use less, then total demand drops, permanently.
Climate change or not, the economic arguments for cutting demand are unarguable. Our trade balance is beyond our means to live without borrowing, and so we are at mercy of foreign banks.
There are/were govt grants and whatnot available for insulation, just no-one used them. Many moons ago I used such a scheme to get BOGOF on rolls of rockwool from wickes. My old man had his roof double insulated for free, albeit a CRAP job as they didn't tuck it in at the edges and left big gaps. And there lies the issue as companies want to make as much profit from the govt cash so do a crap job.
Using less is always the best idea.
"There are/were govt grants and whatnot available for insulation, just no-one used them."
The hoops that have to be gone through for many of those grants puts people off. You also have to be an exact fit for the program or you get the distinct impression all of the work filling out forms will be for nought.
"In my case, I produce my own renewables. Demand from the wider system from my house was Zero, including at night."
That's the direction I've been moving although I don't think that being completely divorced from the grid would give me the best ROI. To build out a solar system with storage that could serve all of my needs year round isn't cost effective. The battery system and the overbuild cost too much.
>” People don't buy renewable energy because it's cheap, they buy it because they want to reduce the amount of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere.”
Tha was the case with the early adopters. However, the intent was that by creating demand, investment would be attracted to renewables and production prices would go down and so be affordable to the many…
Obviously, this didn’t take into account the pricing weirdness of the UK electricity market.
">” People don't buy renewable energy because it's cheap, they buy it because they want to reduce the amount of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere.”
Tha was the case with the early adopters. However, the intent was that by creating demand, investment would be attracted to renewables and production prices would go down and so be affordable to the many…"
That belief is based on far more altruism than exists in the world. The sentiment is very nice, but I'm not going to pay a premium for it.
If going green will save me money, I'm motivated. I'm adding more passive solar heating to the house so it's warmer in winter, but I haven't used the central heating in over 6 years now. Letting the house get cold and using an electric blanket has saved a big wodge of money. I have an electric heater I turn on in the bathroom when I will be taking a shower. One of my projects is to add solar heating to my bathroom so it's always rather warm in winter and I won't need the heater anymore. The solar PV panels that I will be putting in to run my swamp cooler in summer will be powering a heater in the cold months. None of this has any basis in trying to reduce my CO2 contribution. It's the cash.
Wrong. But of course this is what the 'renewables' parasites would want you to believe.
@Jellied Eel
Wind your neck in you muppet. European electricity prices are pegged to the price of gas. Even in Nuclear/Hydro rich France.
Watch this with the English auto-translate and learn something. Then retract your BS with an apology:
https://youtu.be/Nu9wqcNARYc
No chance of getting Jellied Eel to back down on this one. I see "someone" has been going through all my recent posts and adding a downvote. One does not have to think too hard to work out likely candidates to go to the trouble of doing that.
You are looking at consumer cost, which is hard to compare and doesn't say much about production cost. Some countries have amazing grids, some country's grids are held together by tie wraps and duct tape. Some countries add extra levies to pay for grid upgrades, some don't. Some countries add extra levies for an energy transition, some don't. Some countries have a well functioning utilities market, some don't.
If you want to look at the wholesale cost per source you'd need to look at what's called the 'Levelized cost of electricity' (LCOE). Then you'll typically see, from cheapest to more expensive, something along the lines of Large-scale solar -> offshore wind -> onshore wind -> combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) -> geothermal -> nuclear -> small scale solar * -> coal (hard) -> coal (soft) -> more obscure sources such as old fashioned gas plants, oil, etc.
Occasionally offshore wind and onshore wind trade places in that order, dependent on geography. Spain will probably have cheaper onshore than offshore wind whereas Denmark will have it the other way around. Also, load factors vary per country so some countries will have wind farms that produce about 60% of the time, other countries only 30% (often, but not solely, based on whether they have more offshore wind parks as offshore has a higher LF). But interestingly enough, even an abundance of coal in a country doesn't reduce the wholesale price that much. And neither does having serious economies of scale in nuclear, like the French have.
The thing is that the fuel cost only plays a part role in the total cost of producing a MWh. Obviously fuel cost for wind and solar plants is zero per MWh whereas gas or uranium or coal cost money but the total cost of construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning etc. is where the real expenditure lies.
* Small scale solar, such as people putting a few solar panels on their house, is not very cheap in the grand scheme of things but because it's individuals who become less dependent on their energy supplier it might still make economic sense for them. Even more so because most other forms of electricity production are usually beyond the reach of individuals.
As a consumer the wholesale prices are meaningless. I was specifically listing consumer prices as that is what affects most people. The claim 'wind and solar are cheap' doesn't pan out at the consumer level.
The consumer is being fed the line that wind is 9x cheaper than fossil and nuclear power but the reality is higher consumer prices generally match up with higher % of renewable in the grid.
@Len
"The thing is that the fuel cost only plays a part role in the total cost of producing a MWh. Obviously fuel cost for wind and solar plants is zero per MWh whereas gas or uranium or coal cost money but the total cost of construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning etc. is where the real expenditure lies."
Sounds like a lot of theory in the comment however in practice Germany has severe issues for applying unreliables and had to fall back on coal and nukes. France uses nukes and keeps the lights on for the surrounding countries that use unreliables.
It seems the push for unreliable energy and banning working forms of energy generation (fossil fuel) has backed everyone into a corner to suddenly accept nukes as the option that is left. Hell the only way to get monuments to a sky god in the UK was for government subsidy and abusing the market to favour unreliables and 25% of our energy bills went to subsidising the nonsense. The outcome was not falling energy prices. They went up.
And thats before the war which showed how little the unreliables matter because it sits on the availability of gas generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs
Capacity factor is a key here. Nuclear in the 90% range, solar in the 20s and wind in the 40s.
That missing % has to be made up somehow. Wind and solar are '9x cheaper' for 30% of the time.
Indeed, the inspections take longer as they get older. Design plays a key role too. The UK gas reactors are designed to refuel onload but then go offline every few years for checks and maintenance. Usually scheduled well in advance.
PWR reactors cannot refuel onload so run for a period of time at full power then get shutdown for refuelling and maintenance at the same time. As they are generally smaller and have less parts this takes less time.
The AGRs were a nice idea as they produce proper superheated steam and used standard coal fired type turbines, but an awful lot of the stuff you want to inspect is deep inside the biological shield. Boilers, pumps etc. On a PWR these are still inside the main containment but can be inspected without irradiating anyone.
You also need to inspect the graphite, something PWRs don't need. Which is why the gas reactors didn't catch on :) We picked that design as almost all the parts could be produced in the UK. We've never had the ability to make the PWR pressure vessels.
If people haven't read it, this article by Charlie Stross about a visit to the Torness AGR is fascinating.
"We've never had the ability to make the PWR pressure vessels."
There's only a couple of places that can fabricate those vessels. I recall Japan was one and I seem to remember that there was one in the US that is gone now. The father of the PWR, Alvin Weinberg, is quoted as saying it isn't a good way to go about it. His autobiography points out many of the political issues surrounding civilian nuclear power.
The pressure vessel for Sizewell B was made in Japan. The EPR pressure vessels are made by Framatome in France (didn't realise the French did such things!) and Rosatom can make them for the VVER reactors.
It is the sort of thing we could have made in the UK 100 years ago....
The CANDU and RBMK reactors were both designed to not need the huge forgings but the flip side is you have a bazillion miles of welds.
Light water PWR has its issues. As no-one is being serious about 'what next' it is the best we can do right now.
Absolutely. Which is why there is 100GW+ of connections coming.
30% of 100GW available all of the time is enough to cover virtually all UK demand other than on freak days; and probably leave enough for export too.
Being a net exporter is good for trade balance. Regardless of whether you care about CO2 or not (you should), this is still a good thing.
"France uses nukes and keeps the lights on for the surrounding countries that use unreliables."
..except for those occasions when the river water is too hot to cool down the unrenukables, and France has to import solar and wind from Germany in order to keep the lights on.
The trick is to have a common grid and diversified power generation. What is really missing right now is storage. This is something we can work on.
Dismissing all renewables as unreliable, and insisting on the expanded use of a power source which can not come online in time, and which, when all aspects is entered into the equation, tends to show up as uneconomical, is something that you may want to think about again.
Personally, I am not against properly conducted nuclear power. However, I am coming to the conclusion that current nuclear technology may not be up to the task on hand.
I do have one or two "pie in the sky" technologies which I hope will surface in time, but for now, I think we will have to create diversified power generation wherever possible.
Yes, but they have also had to import when the nukes that codejunky insists on as being the only reliable option, could not work due to climate change.
Oh.. and what I was thinking of was last year. Are you saying that it happened this year as well? How can this be?
..And with regards to all end customers electricity price comparisons: Through the unified grid and common market, most of the price differences that you see are political.
Different nations apply different levies and taxes. This is happily being ignored throughout this thread.
Most of the issues were due to an aging fleet of reactors and discovering that they needed to do preventative maintenance on most of them at the same time. If they had diversity of age and design this would not have been an issue.
The river temperature issue only caused a reduction in output power, not a complete shutdown in most cases.
The reactors are coming back on line and service is being restored. Along with exports.
I've always been told by the wind and solar bunch that relying on one off number is 'not representative' of how well renewables work.
The price differences are political in that the different countries pick a different mix. And again we have the correlation of more % renewables and higher prices.
@LogicGate
"the nukes that codejunky insists on as being the only reliable option"
Just to correct, I dont insist nukes are the only reliable option. We have plenty of reliable generation methods but the deployable ones get blacklisted for the MMCC co2 theory reaction. We know how to create electricity by various means. We also know how to do so reliably. We also have people who have the believe that humanity must be destroyed, modernisation rejected, wealth a sin, and romanticises peasantry.
For once, I have nothing to complain about your post :)
May I suggest that you stop bombasting with the repeated use of "unreliables".. It is easier to have a discussion without name-calling.
edit: bombasting, not bimbasting. I can not imagine Bob as a blonde..
@LogicGate
"May I suggest that you stop bombasting with the repeated use of "unreliables".. It is easier to have a discussion without name-calling."
Then what can I call the unreliables? When I am name calling I say they are monuments to a sky god in the hope that it farts and mirrors for a sky god in hope that it smiles down. That is the name calling piss taking of technology that is not mature enough to be deployed on the grid right now.
When I say unreliables I am differentiating between green, faux green and sky god stuff. Green tech includes things like geothermal and hydro and faux green being Drax wood chip burning. I used to say green tech meaning the useless monstrosities of the new religion but then people would bring up things like hydro (quite rightly) because I wasnt clear enough.
So in place of saying 'wind and solar' every time I say unreliables, which is accurate and honest and only upsets dreamers who dislike the fact. So what alternative but truthful word do you think I should change it to?
"We also have people who have the believe that humanity must be destroyed, modernisation rejected, wealth a sin, and romanticises peasantry."
Careful everyone. A straw man of that magnitude could topple over any minute and crush us all !!!!
RUN. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!
I think there was a film about codejunky's posts made in 1973.
@LogicGate
The French have this for electricity production. Nuclear is of course stable.
https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source
The GB grid here.
https://grid.iamkate.com/
The Swedish plus other Nordic countries and Baltic countries here, sadly with no separation of solar power.
https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/
The Finnish here:
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Countries are different and that affects the electricity production too.
If you want to look at the wholesale cost per source you'd need to look at what's called the 'Levelized cost of electricity' (LCOE). Then you'll typically see, from cheapest to more expensive, something along the lines of Large-scale solar -> offshore wind -> onshore wind -> combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) -> geothermal -> nuclear -> small scale solar * -> coal (hard) -> coal (soft) -> more obscure sources such as old fashioned gas plants, oil, etc.
Except of course that's a steaming pile of BS dreamt up by the 'renewables' lobby to try and make their product appear affordable.
Problem is LCOE intentionally excludes a wide range of costs and is pretty much irrelevant to actual market requirements. The market wants cheap, reliable electricty because that's what powers our economy. So the cost per MWh available 24x7x365.
Solar can't do this because, well, night. Wind can't do this because windspeeds are highly variable. So LCOE deliberately excludes the cost of providing stand-by generation for night time, or when the wind isn't blowing, or blowing too fast. Then there's the costs to connect wind and solar to the grid, which can be massive, especially for off-shore eg-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-66023678
Two windfarms off the Suffolk coast were approved by the government last year - East Anglia One North (EA1N) and East Anglia Two (EA2).
The total connection cost for those two subsidy farms will be around £7bn, which isn't paid by the wind farm developers and just gets added to our bills instead. Same with the costs of garbage like battery farms to try and overcome 'renewables' inadequacies.
Of course if the true costs were known, there would be no justification to build this junk instead of more nuclear, or more modern coal power stations. Especially when new nuclear tends to be reactors where there were existing ones already, eg Sizewell, so much of the infrastructure is already in place. Alternatively, the CfD market could be reformed to firm prices based on good delivery. So that way if someone bids for 500MW of capacity, it has to deliver 500MW 24x7x365. That could also be done as a MWh model, and it would be the suppliers problem (and cost) to make good.
Of course that would also mean no more 'renewables', because they have never, and will never make economic sense in an energy market that has alternative cheaper and more reliable ways to deliver the the energy we need.
Those of you with smart metering - why can't we have a tariff that follows the wholesale price?
For those who want a green tariff - they also get cut off - or have a minimal allowance overnight when the wind isn't' blowing?
(Or - the price goes right up?)
The disconnect (sic) is that we don't have consumer pricing related to the peaks and troughs. If we did so, we could have:
- Smart plugs that turn on an appliance when the energy price is low, e.g. a washing machine.
- Car charging that only charges when the energy price is low (for infrequent car users).
All this technology is do-able now, we have the electronics and simple computers to implement it.
If we adjusted consumer demand in this way it would relieve a lot of the problems caused by a flat rate maintained for months on end.
"Of course that would also mean no more 'renewables', because they have never, and will never make economic sense in an energy market that has alternative cheaper and more reliable ways to deliver the the energy we need."
Not as grid supply sources, no. They could be useful for uses that can tolerate intermittent power. The manufacture of Ammonia is a good example. I expect there are others.
> If you want to look at the wholesale cost per source you'd need to look at what's called the 'Levelized cost of electricity' (LCOE).
I consider wholesale energy costs in the same vein that I consider the stock market when buying groceries.
"from cheapest to more expensive, something along the lines of Large-scale solar -> offshore wind -> onshore wind -> combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) -> geothermal -> nuclear -> small scale solar * -> coal (hard) -> coal (soft) -> more obscure sources such as old fashioned gas plants, oil, etc."
That takes in a whole range of assumptions since those sources are not drop-in replacements for each other. No sun, no solar at any scale. No wind, it doesn't matter whether it's on or off shore. CCGT is good if you run it long enough to amortize the startup/heatup and it's a primary source rather than being used as a back up to wind/solar where the added on/off cycles incur a higher cost for maintenance.
Where is this insanely cheap wind and solar electricity?
It's on the grid... the issue is that the price is set by the most expensive form of generation in use - generally gas at the moment.
https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/the-electricity-to-gas-price-ratio-explained-how-a-green-ratio-would-make-bills-cheaper-and-greener/
"Where is this insanely cheap wind and solar electricity?"
It's in places where there isn't already power lines in place.
A guy I knew at the rocket club built a house on some land he bought and the price the power company wanted to put in the poles and run the lines was 4x the cost of a big solar install plus a back up diesel generator. He sold power to the person on the neighboring plot who had the same issue but couldn't afford to build his house AND have the solar as well.
"We've seen recently investment backing out of wind farms as it is becoming 'too expensive'."
Without continuing subsidies, yes, it's too expensive. I'm of the opinion that it's too expensive for the way it's being used. Just hooking the turbines into the grid isn't optimum since they can be highly intermittent. They need to be paired with uses that can handle that intermittency and can be located next to/on the wind farms. The old adage is you 'make hay while the sun shines'. What would be good to make when the wind blows (except faces as they could get stuck).
Denmark. Minus the taxes.
The tax per kWh is the highest in Europe, but in the middle of the day, when the wind is blowing hard, the base price is often 0, sometimes negative.
And we only had to cover the country in eyesores that will have to be landfilled at end-of-life.
When the tax was reduced for a while, there were people who could use power and get paid for it. It happened a few times. That also meant those with solar panels PAID to put their energy in to the grid.
"Sometimes they stop the turbines."
Oversupply becomes an issue and can upset the balance of the grid. Now if pricing can be sent down the lines and EV's programmed by their owners to take advantage of cheap prices to charge, that could be a way to create demand to take up the supply. An industry that uses lots of heat might be able to use electrical energy to recharge a salt based thermal battery. Specifically I'm thinking of food processing/packaging. Heinz beans are cooked in the can using steam pressure cookers. B&M bread in a can uses steam to cook the bread after the dough has been sealed in. The manufacture of drywall uses a lot of heat. When supply exceeds demand and prices are low, that's a great time to save a few bob if the cost of storage isn't too expensive. Li batteries aren't the best idea.
"Nuclear is on course to drop out of the top five cheapest ways to produce electricity and I see no way it can compete with, for instance, solar and wind power which, all things considered, are becoming insanely cheap. I don't see how nuclear could ever become cheaper than those two again. There's something to be said for nuclear to power submarines, perhaps even spaceships, but not countries any more. I think that ship has sailed."
Modular reactors are the way to make them economically viable. Why do we insist on throwing away the design every time we build something...
Yes, every time Rolls Royce talked to the Government, the Sir Humphreys shoo'ed them away. If they'd signed up for one, it would be on and generating its 400MW by now.
And the next one would be nearly done, and the following ones on order, so that multiple GW would have been available in a reasonable time frame.
But no.. Sizewell.
And as I’ve said umpteen times; sizewell was meant to be the prototype for a whole fleet of that design.
Thatcher destroyed the CEGB and along with it the sizewell plan. North Sea has was deregulated and allowed for base load generation in the late 80s; and the 90s saw the ‘dash for gas’ to replace coal.
By 2008 we had burned up so much of the reserve we became a net importer; with panicked projects like the LNG import terminals necessary to backfill.
The point has been made today one cannot vote for a change in the past. The only thing stopping us getting on with it today are the combination of incompetent government, red tape. NIMBYism and cold hard cash. People moan about Britains lack of economic growth. Here’s a freaking obvious way way can generate it. But no, Tories say no.
"Modular reactors are the way to make them economically viable."
I disagree. Reactors aren't cheap, but the big variable costs can be all of the things that surround the build. Things like blood sucking lawyers and a never ending stream of lawsuits being filed that start and stop construction from week to week and even years at a time. I also advocate for trying out some more modern designs rather than an assembly line of what's been done for the last 60 years. SMR's wouldn't be allowed close to population centers on a whole bunch of levels. So while it makes technical sense to have smaller reactors installed closer to where the power is used, don't count on that happening.
> Now were at a time where even many governments don't have the required funds any more to make it happen.
I don't think that's the main issue as they can essentially just print the money. The main issue is we appear institutionally unable to build things at scale anymore. Some combination of lack of knowledge, structural government/council issues, corruption, legal issues/NIMBYism or simply the inability to take any long-term actions from a governing system that works in 5-year blocks, and it's crippling for something like nuclear power. It's bad enough for much more simple projects like train lines, or even houses - we cannot even get that right.
"It simply cannot compete on price because construction is so hideously expensive. "
It simply cannot compete on price because lawyers are so hideously expensive. FTFY
The construction issues can often come about when projects are stopped one day, resumed next week, put on hold for a few years and then restarted once again. It means new crews all of the time and the training that entails along with all of the work that has to be done to clean up a work site that has sat idle for a period of time. It all has to be kept secure in the mean time which adds costs as well.
While the trend on the wholesale electric is only downward.
I read that, and almost spat out my tea, even though I finished it ten minutes ago.
I don't know which supplier you're with, but my electricity price, whilst it has dropped a little recently, is still way above what it was a couple of years ago. I can't remember a time when electricity prices ever had a downward trend, let alone the standing charge, which basically seems to be a daily fee for the privilege of not living in the 19th century.
Productionising those reactors to a point they would pass civil legislation is the obvious issue; as are the requirements on the surrounding network.
For example, Nuke generators have to have no less than four grid connections plus their own backups. They must also plan for decommissioning from the outset. The navy's approach to decomm Nuke boats is to park them on a pier more or less indefinitely. In fact they are running out of piers because of this... Clearly not an option for onshore.
The skills supply chain to drive all these new reactors is also in very short supply. Not many physics and engineering grads anymore, as well as closing our borders to one of the most well educated labour markets on the planet.
"The skills supply chain to drive all these new reactors is also in very short supply. Not many physics and engineering grads anymore, as well as closing our borders to one of the most well educated labour markets on the planet."
The US Navy was after me for a few years to join their nuclear power program after I scored high on their tests. The trouble is it was a lifetime hitch. Not a lifetime of active service, but a long time of being in active service broken up with periods of university and being subject to recall until the point one can't get around on a boat or is a bit senile. You will wind up with a Phd, or suffer the consequences of doing poorly in the military. I looked at it and decided that I'd not like to live months at a time in a section of sewer pipe crammed in with a bunch of other guys. Even working on an aircraft carrier isn't much fun especially when it effectively can be called indentured servitude since you can't quit without exceptionally bad consequences.
On the outside, the best places to get an advanced degree in nuclear physics are horribly expensive. I looked at it last year and at my age, there would be no ROI. Even for somebody that has a freshly printed undergrad degree, it would be a crazy amount of money in more loans unless they chose the right parents with lots of money to pay for it all. Maybe the military is driving up the price since they'll pay to have their personnel in the programs at taxpayer expense.
Yep, a degree in Physics in the late 90's was a ticket into a job in the finance sector, and not too expensive to do either, and so a good choice at the time.
ROI on taking on those subjects today is largely madness. Especially now with fees at exorbitant levels. Advanced apprenticeships where you do a degree while being paid are quite good; and I would actively recommend them in fact, but there aren't many spaces to go round.
I don't see many companies recruiting and training hand over fist. Many FTSE companies in the energy sector claim this is necessary to deliver net zero.
"Advanced apprenticeships where you do a degree while being paid are quite good"
You don't even have to do a degree. Lots of trades can pay extremely well. Just specialize in unblocking loos in the evenings and weekends and in very few years you will have a home in the city and another in the country paid with cash. I saw a show where there was a stone mason certified to work on grade 1 listed buildings that was booked out 18 months in advance. Talk about job security and somebody that needs a stone mason with those certifications is stuck paying whatever rates they charge. It's too bad that school counselors aren't looking at those career paths when they are advising kids on possibilities. Getting the certifications to do electrical work is good, but it's even better to add a historical building cert to that and double one's income.
I'm happy for them.
The difference is, when I hope for something, it only concerns me.
When a government hopes for something, it has the means to make it happen.
If UK Gov restricts itself to "hoping", then it hasn't done its job.
Lay down the rules if you want it to happen. You're Government, you're supposed to decide. That's what you're elected for.
If you can't do that, then resign.
The Tory ideology does not allow for anything outside the rule set of the ideology.
So any solution not conforming to their beliefs will not be enacted.
I still cannot fathom why the UK public have not realised the restrictive nature of Tory policies.
Neil Kinnocks long shadow of anti nuke campaigning is probably in many Tory supporters memories.
As a pragmatic, anti-Tory, there are no parties offering comprehensive plans. But some are better than others.
And practically anything is better than the free for all of money printing for your rich mates that are the Tories.
A plan would involve having sites selected, land bought, consenting in progress and so forth; and the involved parties well and truly identified.
The incumbents have been proven repeatedly the only thing they can organise is a pish up in the office. But such is the fantasy they continue to live off (and win elections with).
It was only a few months ago they leered at Starmer's GB Energy proposal; only to follow it with GB Nuclear a matter of moments later.
Not wishing to give too much credit to the opposition, I do not believe ANY outfit has done a fully costed plan of the scale of what is necessary. As was amply pointed out in Dr. David Mackay's book; you have to have a plan. "I don't care what's in it, but you have to have a plan that adds up".
Anything else is wishful thinking.
Yes, We really need to get away from professional politicians and towards MPs who are subject matter experts from across real life.
As for a plan. - Are we in an global climate emergency or not? - Nobody objected1 to normal purchasing rules going out the window in the early 2020 health emergency.
The government only needs to pass a law to give itself a carte blanche building permit to deal with the emergency and then tell UK industry to get on with replacing every CO2 producing power station. A bunch of boffins can draw up the list and the current owner/operators get a timeline for when they need to be nuclear operation certified (or lose the nice new plant that UK tax payers are giving them).
Nothing in this prevents any other clean generation capacity from being installed.
Allocating 1%2 of GDP until 2050 would replace the half dozen old Nuke plants we have and also build SMRs by the score. While they’re at it, point the 0.7% GDP foreign aid cash at handing out SMRs to needy small countries as well. This level of production would rapidly bring the economies of scale needed to move away from what is more or less a perpetual stream of expensive one off builds.
1 We all knew then that there'd be 20/20 holier-than-thou hindsight when the cock-up & criminal horror stories eventually emerged.
2 £20Bn give or take
The climate change problem requires practically a wartime level of mentality to production.
The supply chains cannot keep up with the demand for Basic equipment needed to build new or replace older network.
Shit chinesium copies of European equipment are appearing on the market with favourable pricing but terrible build quality.
This isn't just a UK problem, and if politicians globally had any balls COP or related conferences might have been able to actually push appropriate action.
But the window dressing shall continue until such time existential threats surface. I'm not sure I want to be around when the next generation or two asks us why the fuck did we get into this mess, and the only answer we can give is for a few zeroes on some rich bastards spreadsheet.
This isn't just a UK problem, and if politicians globally had any balls COP or related conferences might have been able to actually push appropriate action.
Politicians know that COP is all about lobbyists convincing gullible politicians to hand over $100bn+ a year to the UN to hand over to their mates. Most of it was dreamt up by a chap by the name of Maurice Strong, who got caught taking a rather large personal cheque during his time with the UN's previous slush fund, administering the 'oil for bribes.. I mean food' program.
I'm not sure I want to be around when the next generation or two asks us why the fuck did we get into this mess
They're more likely to be asking their parents why they can't afford to turn their heating on because it's freezing. But you don't have to wait a couple of generations, energy poverty is fast increasing in our supposedly 'developed' economies thanks to going back to trying to use pre-Industrial power tech that our ancestors previously abandoned.
Those that ignore history can get well paid jobs working for the 'renewables' lobby I guess.
The government only needs to pass a law to give itself a carte blanche building permit to deal with the emergency and then tell UK industry to get on with replacing every CO2 producing power station.
Just like the way they decided to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, and then sat back waiting for manufacturers to make cheap electic cars, chargers to grow on trees, the grid to upgrade itself to be able to supply them all, and the magic money tree to compensate them for the 30bn they earn every year from petrol and diesel sales?
You can't fix a problem by outlawing something defined as "bad" and expecting a good "new" something to just appear, you need a certain amount of planning and joined-up thinking, something notably absent from UK goverment policies since the mid-1990s.
>” The government only needs to pass a law to give itself a carte blanche … to deal with the emergency”
They’re only the small thing of a general election looming on the horizon. However, if the Conservatives win, would not be surprised if they do exactly this and repeal the 5 year limit on tenure…
Right wing political party in making shit up shock horror. All this is is an example of the fundamental unfairness of 21st century politics. Left wing parties are expected to be moral, upstanding and honest. When they live up to this ideal, they’re accused of virtue signalling. When they fail to live up to this ideal (as, being human, they’re inevitably wont to do once in a while), they’re eviscerated for it.
Right wing parties are expected to be venal and dishonest. They trade on it, encouraging their servant media outlets to promulgate the lie that “all political parties are alike really”. And so they’re allowed to claim that Brexit is a good idea, or that they can make America great again, or that they’re morally upstanding and fiscally responsible. Or, as in this case, they’ll build a nuclear reactor every year and give everyone unicorn steak forever more.
The sad thing is that there are still plenty of people who believe this rubbish.
The sadder thing is that politics, as with many things, needs balance. And we need a credible right wing party which can provide a cogent counter argument to the policies of the left. However sensible the policies of the left are, we need sensible arguments from the right to ensure that the ramifications are fully explored. And that just isn’t happening right now.
No. I dispute that. But, even if it is true, unless you have a time machine, what has happened in previous elections is largely irrelevant. You can’t vote for it. What matters is what’s happening now.
And to be clear, I want there to be a sensible right wing party to provide balance. And I genuinely feel sorry for the millions of moral, upstanding, right of centre people who’ve been disenfranchised by the modern GOP, Tories etc.
There is no upstanding mainstream right wing or left wing party in the UK - all we have are two slight variations on the globalist, corporatist out-for-what-they-can-get parties.
Politics is framed by the Overton window, which frames what mainstream political options are acceptable in any country at a given time. Over time it shifts about - left and right - for many reasons. What is quite noticeable in recent years is that this shift is no longer acceptable as it's currently where the globalists want it and they are effectively stopping it from moving. Anyone slightly outside it, who is getting enough poltiical momentum that they might cause it to shift, will be subjected to smears and attempts to discredit them. Some clear examples: on the left, there is Jeremy Corbyn, on the right, Nigel Farage. In the US, there is Donald Trump on the right. If someone on the left who the globalists don't like (Kennedy, say) make much headway, they too are likely to on the receiving end of smear campaigns.
It's classic divide-and-rule tactics: It's easy to get Guardian readers wound up about Farage or Trump, or Daily Mail readers to get hot under the collar about Corbyn. Both sides seem completely obvlivious to the way they are being played off against each other.
to work for a nuclear/aerospace manufacturer.
Its now just aerospace as the nuclear bit was shutdown/sold off/de-skilled/everyone fired(I'd long left by then)
The only way you're going to get the staff capable of making a nuclear reactor(along with all the gubbins that goes into one) is to train them first........... however a lot of the people with the skills are either dead/retired/doing aerospace/all 3
And besides just as you decide to take up a job as a skilled instrument maker to help supply the coming fleet of 12 nuclear power stations with specialised gear to moniter them/help run them, a general election takes place and the incoming party says 'fuck this project, it wont come close to paying out politically in the next five years, shut it all down"
4 years later the lights go out one cold winters evening, the thin skin of civillisation comes off and the governing party finds itself thrown out of power so fast that its feet dont even touch the ground and instead swing around gently in the breeze.
What the country needs is an agreement among the parties that some civil projects are far too important to be left to party politics, power generation is one of them.
But I dont what I'm wittering on about... the decision to build enough nuclear to generate 80% of our power needs should have been made 25 to 30 years ago, imagine that.. 60 Gw of power with no CO2 emission... and now its too late
Thatcher was a chicken with regards getting nuke into circulation. Destroying the only organisation with credible capability to actually deliver on it was borderline criminal.
If you read the plans of the CEGB from 1981 they very clearly lay out that sizewell B was to be the prototype of a whole series of reactors of that level of capability, Dinorwig the safety system in event of failure of one of the nukes, and for gas and wind to top up variable demand.
It was, and still is a credible plan, but without the power driving it...
"and now its too late"
If that's the case, when do we get to go to the sleepshop and remove ourselves from the population.
There comes a time where you have to ignore the past and plan for the future from that moment. Electrical power usage per capita is well correlated with quality of life. The trouble comes when there is already too many people onboard that are all striving for a high quality of life. If that power is generated in a wasteful and polluting way, the population issue will be dealt with through resource depletion and a polluted environment. Going forward, humans need to be more efficient in the use of power, work towards cleaner methods of generation AND a reduction in population. Starting 30 years ago would have been better but 1993 has already been all used up.
In that time frame, Molten Salt Reactors will be viable.
And there is use of small (nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier sized) reactors distributed throughout the grid. Distributed power sources are a more secure way to create a reliable grid.
And as for the question of what do we do with the nuclear waste: how are we doing with the carbon waste?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
