Net zero could push energy bills up by £120 a year

[platinum87]

This is bizarre nonsense, especially considering Nuclear is part of UK's net zero initiative so you are completely wrong before you even get started!



But your entire hypotheses is flawed. Nuclear energy is the most expensive energy known to man, and the prices are increasing massively year on year. Conversely, Solar and wind are the cheapest energy we can produce

Levelized cost of electricity - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And to power nuclear stations requires uranium which the UK has zero production capacity, and most of the world's supply comes from the Russian puppet state of Kazakhstan. Even the technology to build a nuclear power station now heavily relies on china.
\
\Conversely, the UK is blessed with some of the highest green energy resources in a develop country, with a massive opportunity to be a leading green energy exporter .

The link you provide does not properly calculate costs, solar and wind are cheap but require batteries if going down the route of fully renewable.

Nuclear would be cheaper when scaled up.

Uranium is more abundant than tin, if concerned about Russian puppets we can get all the uranium from canada/usa/australia

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

This is bizarre nonsense

Did you miss the 87 warning sign?

Your graph links to a Wikipedia page that acknowledges dispatchability. So whilst Solar and Wind are cheap you have to buy twice whether that is back up conventional thermal generation or storage via hydrogen and batteries. Without doing a deep dive I am surprised that coal is so expensive on the graph given that £40-60 per MWh is a very achievable generation cost once you take out the carbon floor price in the UK which is comparable with natural gas.

Nuclear cost is heavily driven by the capital costs of build but of course we haven't built reactors in the West for 30 years and so we're not good at it. That's why we need to commit to large scale cookie cutter deployment to bring those prices down. The UK is also awash with MOX fuel and uranium has not historically been a strategically difficult to resource I think South Africa is also a supplier.

Unfortunately I agree with your analysis. We are too late to simply go green on it all, and as such despite being semi anti nuclear personally IMO for the next 50 years its the best plan.
My suspicion is that post that 50 years then green can handle it, if not then safer nucs or fusion may be with us.

Hell we may even need some fossil fuels for deep winter generation. I am not actually against that either. As long as we are doing enough to capture and reverse the warming then using some fossils is fine.

I have a minor issue when I see people assuming nuclear would come down in costs however. As an accountant my curiosity actually led me to find that even building more of the same nuclear station means the costs go up each time.
Sounds odd right, well the issue is that due to the massive caution they apply they always find ways to reengineer for even better resilience etc. Thats no bad thing, but its the only thing I have come across in years of my profession that works opposite to the more you do it the cheaper it gets.
I suspect that the mini nucs would actually reverse that trend, but big infra type ones would probably perpetuate it.

 

[Mr Jack]

Nuclear should have been the mainstay for European power generation for the last sixty years - just compare the clean French and filthy German power grids to see why - but with the incredibly rapid falls in the cost of renewables and all the new storage technologies that have been developed, I don't think investing heavily in nuclear now makes sense.

Thankfully, we'll have commercial Fusion in twenty five years so it's all moot.

 

[Ayahuasca]

I don't mind paying it if that £120 genuinely makes a difference.

However, when are China, India, Indonesia, Brazil etc going to take net zero seriously? As it makes very little difference globally what little old England does.

IIRC the UK is already doing very well in the race for carbon neutrality.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

I don't mind paying it if that £120 genuinely makes a difference.

However, when are China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil and Nigeria etc going to take net zero seriously? As it makes very little difference globally what little old England does.

IIRC the UK is already doing very well in the race for carbon neutrality.

China are catching up and in typical command economy style don't face half the issues we do in regards deciding what to do
Worth googling the largest chinese solar farm, just to see the pics.

The rest of them I am not so sure but suspect laggards for sure.

China are the largest emitter by raw number but they are half the amount per head than the good old US of A
Worth reviewing https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/

 

[PlacidCasual]

I have a minor issue when I see people assuming nuclear would come down in costs however. As an accountant my curiosity actually led me to find that even building more of the same nuclear station means the costs go up each time.
Sounds odd right, well the issue is that due to the massive caution they apply they always find ways to reengineer for even better resilience etc. Thats no bad thing, but its the only thing I have come across in years of my profession that works opposite to the more you do it the cheaper it gets.
I suspect that the mini nucs would actually reverse that trend, but big infra type ones would probably perpetuate it.

Certainly it didn't work for Magnox or AGR in the UK we ended up with far to many unique variations on the same core technology for both. France built something like 40+ reactors to 3 designs prior to EPR. We built 30+ reactors to about 12 designs.

If you look at Hinkley C for instance it is pulling all the skilled labour in putting up costs for heavy engineering all across the country. Deepening the pools of skilled resource by committing to a large deployment will bring down costs. Equally supply chains are being produced for the first time, they should be repeated and reused. If we had committed to the Forgemasters upgrades in 2010 we would now be making some of the largest forgings in the UK.

The problem of intermittency in the renewables is going to require massive back up and the current plan is the rabbit will be pulled from the hat in either a hydrogen or battery form. But the mass scale technologies for that don't exist and their saleability is a matter of hope not experience. A heavy nuclear baseload hugely reduces the scale of that storage to something that is probably achievable.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Certainly it didn't work for Magnox or AGR in the UK we ended up with far to many unique variations on the same core technology for both. France built something like 40+ reactors to 3 designs prior to EPR. We built 30+ reactors to about 12 designs.

If you look at Hinkley C for instance it is pulling all the skilled labour in putting up costs for heavy engineering all across the country. Deepening the pools of skilled resource by committing to a large deployment will bring down costs. Equally supply chains are being produced for the first time, they should be repeated and reused. If we had committed to the Forgemasters upgrades in 2010 we would now be making some of the largest forgings in the UK.

The problem of intermittency in the renewables is going to require massive back up and the current plan is the rabbit will be pulled from the hat in either a hydrogen or battery form. But the mass scale technologies for that don't exist and their saleability is a matter of hope not experience. A heavy nuclear baseload hugely reduces the scale of that storage to something that is probably achievable.

I think it was actually the french that thes tudy I saw was based on. And how they demonstrated the cost went up each time, but then it was for good reason. Takes a brave person to go there is a better way but we wont make the change as it costs slightly more!

Yes renewables we need to get over the faceplate and 1) stop referring to it (it can power 7000 houses type nonsense) and 2) vastly over build

Getting TOU pricing rolled out will help

I know about the local / national labour issue. I remember Sizewell B being built and how it sucked great chunks of trades out of the local area and in waves, such as when roofers were in demand they were paid 3x the normal rate.

 

[Cornubia]

The cost of net zero is not solely limited to the construction of green generation. The transmission & distribution networks were designed 70 years ago or more as a top down system with a limited number of generators. This infrastructure requires massive upgrades to allow for an increase in power demand and to allow for a distributed model of generator connections.

 

[bigmike20vt]

The cost of net zero is not solely limited to the construction of green generation. The transmission & distribution networks were designed 70 years ago or more as a top down system with a limited number of generators. This infrastructure requires massive upgrades to allow for an increase in power demand and to allow for a distributed model of generator connections.

the annoying thing is this has been on the cards for well over a decade (2 decades?) now...... it's not like it's out of the blue and no one saw it coming.

 

[theone8181]

The link you provide does not properly calculate costs, solar and wind are cheap but require batteries if going down the route of fully renewable.

Nuclear would be cheaper when scaled up.

Uranium is more abundant than tin, if concerned about Russian puppets we can get all the uranium from canada/usa/australia

It doesn't have to batteries, water can be used in a reservoir, it gets pumped uphill during the day, they on a night when solar isn't working, it powers a turbine.

 

[D.P.]

I don't mind paying it if that £120 genuinely makes a difference.

However, when are China, India, Indonesia, Brazil etc going to take net zero seriously? As it makes very little difference globally what little old England does.

IIRC the UK is already doing very well in the race for carbon neutrality.

They already are. China is installing more green energy than any other country. India installed the world's largest solar plant to kickstart

 

[D.P.]

It doesn't have to batteries, water can be used in a reservoir, it gets pumped uphill during the day, they on a night when solar isn't working, it powers a turbine.

By 2030 BESS will be cheaper than pumped hydro

 

[Ayahuasca]

They already are. China is installing more green energy than any other country. India installed the world's largest solar plant to kickstart

They're still miles off hitting their targets though but at least they're on the right track.

 

[theone8181]

By 2030 BESS will be cheaper than pumped hydro

I did wonder if used ev batteries might be daisy chained for that purpose.

 

[Destination]

"Soar" by £120 a year? Where have they been for 12 months?

Mine have gone up by £120 a month, at least

precisely this, lol, when the actual oil price which has dropped starts feeding thru to bills, net zero will mean **** all squared and should be introduced asap, get it done, get it over and done with, no future saved up pain, shoot all the sewage pumper company execs at the same time, and buy back the companies with the money gained from inheritance tax, and lo and behold, we're sorted!

 

[D.P.]

The link you provide does not properly calculate costs, solar and wind are cheap but require batteries if going down the route of fully renewable.

Nuclear would be cheaper when scaled up.

Uranium is more abundant than tin, if concerned about Russian puppets we can get all the uranium from canada/usa/australia

The question was about cost and you made the false claim that renewable energy is only about increasing energy cost vs nuclear in some perverse conspiracy theory. Currently, adding renewable energy reduces energy prices. Fully renewable will require storage, but the total costs is still far less than nuclear

Have you admitted that nuclear is part of UK's net zero initiative?

No, scaling nuclear wont reduce costs. This Is the fundamental problem with massive monolithic solutions that are.made in so few numbers there is no economies of scale. Compare to solar where they are just printed off a giant factory floor at thousands of panels a day. and require minimal labour complexity to install. The problem with nuclear is that they require massive labour pools for 10-15 years, and often highly skilled labour. Labour is very expensive unless you can exploit workers like china does. This creates massive up front costs but the return period to start paying off the loans is now counted in decades. Gor 15-20 years the projects just accumulate billions of costs each year, and each year the interest on the loans compounds. Solar panels can be up and running within 6 months of breaking ground.

This is why nuclear will never be cost effective. Basic laws of physics and economics prevents that. You need to be building thousands of power stations with effectively slave labour and remove all the necessary red tape that ensures safety.

I'm not against nuclear, it is just nuclear is a horrible choice on purely economic grounds


As for supply, uranium already has supply problems. If you excluded Russian controlled sourced there would be bug supply shortages

 

[D.P.]

I did wonder if used ev batteries might be daisy chained for that purpose.

They can, and already are being used like that

 

[adidan]

The question was about cost and you made the false claim that renewable energy is only about increasing energy cost vs nuclear in some perverse conspiracy theory. Currently, adding renewable energy reduces energy prices. Fully renewable will require storage, but the total costs is still far less than nuclear

Have you admitted that nuclear is part of UK's net zero initiative?

No, scaling nuclear wont reduce costs. This Is the fundamental problem with massive monolithic solutions that are.made in so few numbers there is no economies of scale. Compare to solar where they are just printed off a giant factory floor at thousands of panels a day. and require minimal labour complexity to install. The problem with nuclear is that they require massive labour pools for 10-15 years, and often highly skilled labour. Labour is very expensive unless you can exploit workers like china does. This creates massive up front costs but the return period to start paying off the loans is now counted in decades. Gor 15-20 years the projects just accumulate billions of costs each year, and each year the interest on the loans compounds. Solar panels can be up and running within 6 months of breaking ground.

This is why nuclear will never be cost effective. Basic laws of physics and economics prevents that. You need to be building thousands of power stations with effectively slave labour and remove all the necessary red tape that ensures safety.

I'm not against nuclear, it is just nuclear is a horrible choice on purely economic grounds


As for supply, uranium already has supply problems. If you excluded Russian controlled sourced there would be bug supply shortages

I guess it depends if the small nuclear modular reactors take off.

Manufacture in factories, quicker to build, could be an additional option.

 

[D.P.]

I guess it depends if the small nuclear modular reactors take off.

Manufacture in factories, quicker to build, could be an additional option.

That is the idea, but at this stage they are more hypothetical marketing plays to grab state funding. In general, fusion reactors grew in size to increase efficiency because much of the control systems and general overhead is the same if you double the output. It is not obvious that small modular reactors would be cheap enough to still be worth considering.

But again, being more theory than practice they are 20 years or more away from being ready. In the mean time solar, wind, battery and direct hydrogen synthesis will continue to reduce in costs, increase efficiency and capacity

The markets have already decided upon wind, solar and battery. We already see instances of coal mines installing solar panels to run 100% green because it is cheaper than buying electricity from the coal powered station just down the road where all their coal end up.

 

[PlacidCasual]

Voltage control, reactive power, inertia, black start and dispatchability. All of these things renewables cannot provide, so you have to pay twice. First for the headline and then for the rest of the bits that make electricity generation actually work.