Nuclear cheaper than wind, solar as Canada greens its grid: report | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear cheaper than wind, solar as Canada greens its grid: report

finance.yahoo.com

26 pointsmpweiher31 comments

Great, let's build tonnes of it in the UK. To be competitive with offshore wind let's call it a £50 MWh strike price. Should be fine right?

I'll even excuse the lack of clarity of decommissioning the site and long term storage of nuclear waste if you can manage that.

We really should give them the 37.35/MWh that offshore wind gets, afterall it is cheaper than wind.

Hinkley Point C: In 2012, the “strike price” – was set at £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh) + inflation.

Even with comedy level increases in household bills this still looks expensive.

I went a bit higher because there is some debate that the low strike price of one of the offshore wind farms was artificially low due to being able to use existing infrastructure from an earlier project.

Anywhere in that ballpark though and I think we can talk.

A quick google [1] shows me the average price for electricity in the UK was 18.9 p/kWh in 2021. This is the same as £189/MWh. The same article states that the estimate for 2022 is £340/MWh (maybe because of the Russia's invasion of Ukraine?).

The inflation adjusted strike £92.5 of became £106 in 2021 per wikipedia [2].

Not sure how this strike price arrangement works, but does it follow that the UK government did not need to subsidize Hinkley Point C in 2021, and will not have to subsidize it in 2022?

Edit: I did not realize Hinkley Point C is not yet operational. Still, if it were, would it follow that it would make a profit by itself, and would not collect the Government guarantee?

[1] https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

If it was operational, Hinckly would be subsidized if the market price was below the strike price, but they'd need to return anything above that.

It works as an insurance, if you think you can generate electricity for X while making a profit then the government guarantees that you get that amount, taking on the risk that prices might drop or some new tech might undercut your price and guaranteeing a steady cash flow if you deliver electricity.

In return for accepting that risk, they also accept the upside, by taking any extra when the price rises above the strike rate.

Currently there's a few offshore wind farms that are hitting this and returning roughly a billion euros per year.

Wait, so you are saying the Government would actually make quite a nice profit out of Hinkley Point C? That this strike price is the strike of a forward contract rather than a put option contract? But then this does not look like a bad outcome for the UK Government (and by extension the UK consumer) at all, it looks like a really profitable arrangement.

Am I missing something?

Generally it's a really good system, which is being adopted around the world.

For Hinckly, it's the French taxpayer that will be on the hook if there are cost overruns building the plant, because we already know exactly how much they can make from energy for the next decade. (That's why their CFO resigned when they decided to go ahead: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-edf-britain-nuclear-idUKK...)

For the UK taxpayer, they'll probably be paying too much for power they could have got cheaper, but at least the price is somewhat limited, unless there's any kind of accident or issues with storage.

The key missing element with nuclear is that you don't have a vibrant market of competitive bidders, which is what drives the price down in wind and solar.

The way it works is actually slightly more favourable, if the actual price is above the strike price then there is a mechanism to return the excess back to the government. A cost of a wholesale cost of 34p per kWh would be very bad. It's the current retail cap for electricity.

You forgot the bit where Areva robbed the french taxpayers for the cost overruns, the bit where the UK decomissioning costs are way underfunded and get fobbed off onto the taxpayer, and the bit where there is a international treaty saying any incident that costs more than around 10% of the nuclear plant in external costs has its liability covered by the public rather than the plantor the industry as a whole.

The screenshot of the table has new nuclear as the same price range as onshore wind, so we should be able to offer about half-that.

Wind would need to guarantee dispatchability on demand to fix a price. Offering low prices when it can is not the same as reliable on-demand sources.

> Sprott Asset Management CEO John Ciampaglia told Yahoo Finance Canada in August. The Toronto-based financial firm operates the world’s largest physical uranium investment fund.

Just a not very convincing advert.

Canada is probably one of, if not the, most ideal places for nuclear power (northern latitude, existing plants, hydro to complement it) but even there I doubt more than running existing plants for a while makes financial sense.

Hydro makes even more sense to complement renewables. The storage and grid infrastructure is already there for the few times in a day when there is no wind or sun.

> The storage and grid infrastructure is already there for the few times in a day when there is no wind or sun.

Sorry, no. In Europe we are talking about months without sun and wind, usually December, January, February, when day is short (8 hours for central Europe) and night have 16 hours. Wind won't cut it at that time, so only power plants, which are usually running at that time are either coal, natural gas or nuclear ones.

Additionally there is also lack of water through winter, because surprisingly it is frozen in soil and does not move through rivers. So hydro is useless during winter as well.

Hydro and Wind are both at peak production in winter for europe and nicely counterbalance solar:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...

Spring. When there is a thaw. But that's in March and Europeans are considering formal winter up to the ~20th of March, when astronomical spring starts, so you are misreading the data.

However you need that energy in January and February, when there is no hydro going, because everything is frozen.

Everywhere south of 48 degrees has a decent amount of solar resource nearby with at least 5% CF (enough to beat nuclear in price) in January. Using bifacials or tilting the panels a little twice a year pushes this up to around 8%. Very few people live north of that and most of them are either within easy transmission range of an even better solar site or already have at least two of wind, hydro (which they use in winter), and nuclear covering most of their energy.

I understand and agree with the need for factoring in additional storage costs for wind/solar, but why would you do it on a 1:1 basis?

We will probably never need to store 100% of generated renewable energy. Storage would probably need to be a small percentage of the generation capacity.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-back-high-renewable...

This link seems to indicate that the need grows non-linearly. Existing storage is sufficient for 30-50% penetration, whereas it grows to about 20% when it reaches 80% penetration, only hitting 1:1 in the worst case regions for 100% penetration.

No, you see, you have to consider an all solar microgrid using ancient poly panels but at the cost of space rated quad junction cells in Oulu using outdoor non-insulated batteries vs. the output of one particular nuclear reactor in the US but pretend it cost as much as one with 50% uptime in France.

Otherwise you're being mean and unfair.

Storage is almost entirely capex, not opex.

So yes, you do need to actually base the cost on the worst case scenario.

Wrong. Storage has opex, because it has energy losses. Not all the energy that goes in can come out. 2nd Law and all that. On top of that, there will be maintenance and operating staff costs.

Worst case scenario, huh?

So how much does enough storage to cover a months long unplanned nuclear plant outage cost?

A perfect summary of every pro-nuclear argument.

The financials for nuclear are truly terrible. At least when it was the cheapest source, the proliferation risks and highly centralized aspect seemed counter-balanced.

Now there is no upside, and they literally just bribe politicians for subsidies.

And making gains on nuclear would take decades, while solar would continually be rolled out and improve that whole time.

Even when it was "cheapest" it still wasn't really. It was heavily subsidized directly and indirectly by the public and by parts of the supply chain built for military purposes. Even after all that, costs only appeared low because of all the corners being cut. As soon as the industry was held to actually put in place all the safety measure they claimed, prices skyrocketed. Uranium mining in developing nations is still not held to any sort of environmental standard, and the mines in france, canada, ussr, and the usa were never cleaned up. The tailings that weren't just dumped into watersheds on native or lower class land were just half-heartedly covered with a plastic sheet. We're still playing hot potato with th waste from the time, too.

Dams cost less than nuclear. Tvindkraft was the first MW scale turbine in the late 70s and cost about $5 in 2022 dollars per net watt. An investment to the scale of the manhattan project would have gotten us past where we are now at any point in the last century.

>“The Achilles heel of wind and solar is provision of adequate storage, at reasonable cost, of power not needed in the middle of the day, but needed when the sun is not shining and/or the wind is not blowing,”

The Achilles heel of this article is that cheap, large scale pumped storage actually does exist (snowy 2, fengning) while the "cheap" SMR it is touting is still a research project still vacuuming up taxpayer subsidies.

Snowy 2 cost $5 per watt (blown out from initial $1/watt) and already had a bunch of infrastructure. Beats lithium ion by a fair margin for diurnal or longer storage, but hardly a poster child for the process being cheap or on budget.

Still cheaper than nuclear though because 1W of storage can serve 2-3W of wind+solar.

True for existing plants maybe depending on local circumstances but the LCOE is for new plants actually really high.

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