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Comment by rbut | Hacker News Reader

2.6GW for 9.8billion USD. Regardless of the environment, and out of curiosity, what's the comparative price for coal, gas or nuclear stations say over a 10 year period (including build price).

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At 42% capacity factor of 2,600MW, 24 hours and 365 days in a year, that's 9,600,000 MWh in a year. At a 30 year lifespan, the capital expenditure is $330M/year, for an average cost of $34/MWh. This is basically unbelievably cheap for offshore wind, and if you would tel someone 10 years ago this price, they probably wouldn't believe you.

Wind typically has very low operations and maintenance costs compared to the CapEx, but even at 20%, the cost is still less than $45/MWh, which is incredibly cheap. Of course this doesn't factor in the time value of money, but to see raw numbers like this for offshore wind, which historically has been quite a bit more expensive, is a bit shocking to me.

The term of trade is "Levelized cost of electricity", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

Coal is about 2x, gas about 1,3x and nuclear is about 3.6x the LCOE of wind, in 2020, without differentiating between onshore and offshore wind.

That metric disregards _when_ the electricity is actually produced - which is actual blocker. If the raw amount of generated electricity was the real problem, then just build solar. The problems are when wind is still and sun is shining for average an hour a day, like in Poland in December.

Just as in most other parts of central Europe winds seems to be perfectly anticyclical to solar, e.g. higher when solar is lower: https://weatherspark.com/y/87583/Average-Weather-in-Warsaw-P...

It's far from covering the needs in December.

The metric also disregards the true cost of nuclear: the government gives them as an industry a ~$13 billion liability cap, when there are are plausible trillion dollar+ disaster events (one time the great lakes were almost ruined and that is comparatively minor).

If we're going to talk about liability, that makes nuclear look better compared to fossil fuels not worse, as nuclear disasters are so rare and deaths from something like coal are extremely common.

Why is nuclear, middle-of-the-pack in terms of safety, worth singling out? The only thing I can think of is the human preference for people to die gradually in subtle hard to attribute ways than for a far smaller amount of people to die in dramatic nuclear meltdowns.

If what you say is in fact realistic, nuclear plants would be insurable without capped liability. Insurers are not driven by public opinion.

It’s much harder to buy a contract that pays $1B on a 1:1m event, than $1M on a 1:1k event, even though the EV is the same from both contracts.

Very infrequent events are hard to quantify and so the error bars are wider, making insurance more expensive and just riskier for insurers.

Here is the canonical source I site for power death rates: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

How is $13B at all a reasonable liability number for the whole industry?

That's on the order of only the reactor cost itself. The reactor owner may even get compensated instead of the population since some have done leaseback schemes with the operator.

You got it wrong. It’s $13B that the whole industry will pay for a single reactor accident. Every nuclear power plant operator will have to pay $131M per reactor if there is one accident. Each reactor also has a mandatory insurance of $450M. This is to cover liability only.

Separate from that is a mandatory insurance imposed by the NRC of $1.06B per site to cover cleanup costs

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

Liability caps sounds fun. I wonder how much liability the government spends on hydroelectric power in the case of disaster, like say flooding of whole cities downstream.

It would make for a fun thought experiment to take a large one, say Grand Coulee Dam, and calculate the total cost if all that water would suddenly flood downstream.

Why not both? We had nuclear plants in the US downstream of dams that had to be refitted after Fukushima because they realized they could lose backup power from flooding in a dam failure and potentially lead to meltdown.

That’s why you want a network of interconnected grids to smooth out the distribution.

Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy V15.0: https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

In the meantime, the prices for natural gas and coal have doubled: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coal

GW = 1000000 kW

This article I found randomly (so I would only roughly consider this ballpark right) stated natural gas construction cost $812 per kW

https://proest.com/construction/cost-estimates/power-plants/

So 814 million per GW, but that is just construction, you have a massive cost in extracting the fuel and of course burning it that the above number doesn't take into account.

I mean in the end it doesnt matter,the cost of coal and natural gas is destroying our planet.

There's the cost per MWh generated and the cost to build the plant. Once you build wind, the marginal cost of each kWh is very cheap.

In the UK Gas is about 10 times the price per kWh than offshore wind, and that's before the latest price hikes. Wind being £48 per megawatt hour ($56).

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-low-price-for-uk...

2.6GW and a load of 44% would be 10,000 GWh per year. Over 20 years that's 200 billion kWh for 10 billion dollars, or 5 cents per kWh (plus maintenence/operational costs).

For the cost to build for a 2.6GW plant -- in the UK the Beatrice extension in 2019 cost £2.6b for 588MWh, so £11.4b or $13.5b for 2.6GW, so the price doesn't seem out there.

Based on these comments defending wind energy projects, then why would Dominion care if there's a little risk?

Risk is subjective to the requirements being stipulated.

In this case Dominion claimed they could get 42%, what the rider requires, which is above the usual ~35% most wind plants produce. So they probably know they lied and realize that being held accountable for their lie will not be good financially.

42% is not unexpected for large offshore turbines, and it's one of the big advantages of going offshore, despite the expense.

>2.6GW for 9.8billion USD

42% of a 2.6GW.

Taishan NPP was build for 7.5 bln $ - 3.2 GW capacity. And that's "cursed" EPR design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

That's China, not exactly a good comparison with costs

China also built a 100MW offshore wind farm for $100 mio. Comparing building costs between US and China always makes the US project look bad. China is just insanely good at building big projects cheaply (and the US is pretty bad at it, even among its peers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China#:~:text=Co....

But Chinese construction cuts corners so badly a square comes out nearly round.

And it being a nuclear plant it likely has a capacity factor of 85-90%, as opposed to the 30-35%ish for a well placed wind farm.

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