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It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy. If they could just be self-sufficient with a load of nuclear power plants then they would have less political leverage problems

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The UK in particular has a vast abundance of wind power off it's coasts. It makes more sense to double down with 22bn investment in wind!

These solar projects are good to start as they could empower more african nations with cheaper electricty. We just need more electricity everywhere if were going to drop the reliance on oil.

From what I understand, the UK actually has private companies ready and more than willing to build wind farms with their own money. The government is just inexplicably being slow at handing out the permits.

They've (the right wing government) underfunded the government so much there aren't sufficient staff to run the beaucracy. The recent (failed) rocket launch from the UK was massively delayed because of slow government processes

They also price energy in a way that props up fossil fuels

The market for wind in the UK is unusually profitable due to a quirk of the UK electricity market.

Specifically, the power price across the UK is the same everywhere. However, there isn't infinite transmission capacity. So, if you generate power in one place, but the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it, but you still get paid, and you get paid compensation on top.

You know what's better than producing power... being paid to produce power, paid extra compensation, and then not need to actually have those wind turbines spinning (so much reduced maintenance too!).

The government is delaying lots of permits till they can figure out how to change these perverse incentives... Needless to say, the wind industry isn't happy about the fact they might no longer get paid such large amounts, so they're demanding the old scheme be kept in place for existing producers for 25+ years, and having the new pricing rules only apply to new builds...

UK need to divide the country into cost regions based on the bottlenecks and it will work like international power connections. The political problem is making Scotland its own separate region.

Have a look at the regions in for example Sweden which face similar bottlenecks in transmission capacity from north to south.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

There are lots of wind businesses dependent on the old market rules. There are lots of multi-decade power delivery agreements using the old single-price market as a benchmark. If you change the rules, you have to give everyone compensation, or run the risk of being seen as a 'bad place to invest'.

The CFD scheme UK has employed works just as well when introducing regions.

Yes, or indeed Australia.

https://www.aemo.com.au/Energy-systems/Electricity/National-...

Copying the Australian power market with it's >$20k mWh price swings, negative energy prices and brown outs on hot days is not something anyone sane should do.

Australia and California are the poster children of why renewables are terrible for an electricity grid once they get past 10% of generation.

Those price swings are reflecting the economic reality of a product which there is very limited capacity to store and for which both demand and supply can vary rapidly. In practice energy consumers and generators are both limited in their exposure to them through financial instruments like CFDs.

"brown outs on hot days" is straight up propaganda.

And at least having different pricing regions means that it's not investing in building useless generation where there isn't the demand or transmission capacity to move it to where it's required!

>"brown outs on hot days" is straight up propaganda.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/energy-shortage-explainer-...

You're right. They just had to nationalize the market last year. The brownouts were the year before that.

Sorry, were you in Australia? We haven't had load shedding from a LOR (Lack Of Reserve) event almost ever, and we don't commonly get browouts. That's just lies and FUD. That article is actually just "sometimes the grid operator has to ask aluminium smelters to reduce their demand a bit".

The last major power outages to do with the grid were a couple of years ago here in Queensland when a large coal unit (Callide C unit 4) literally blew up, instantly taking a a bit over 800 MW of generation off the grid. Took like three hours to get large parts of the state back on. A year or so before that there was some minor load shedding in Victoria when two coal plants were down for unexpected maintenance over a heat wave (and I think another one or two tripped out in the heat) - and actually solar and wind from other states helped minimise that. Then there was the big one, where massive storms in South Australia took out transmission lines and a bunch of generators (including some wind farms) tripped off. Of course, despite being caused by the storm destroying transmission lines, the right wing did blame the wind farms for it...

> Sorry, were you in Australia? We haven't had load shedding from a LOR (Lack Of Reserve) event almost ever, and we don't commonly get browouts. That's just lies and FUD. That article is actually just "sometimes the grid operator has to ask aluminium smelters to reduce their demand a bit".

I was a quant for one of the top 3 largest electricity retailers in Australia. A wonderful market where you take everyone's money as long as you call it green. It was shocking to see the liberal government tell the truth about renewables while labor and the greens are lying/in denial about them.

"Nationalize"? No, they suspended the market-based dispatch mechanism, in accordance with the rules to which the market participants had agreed, and used centrally directed dispatch for a couple of weeks.

The market failure which required this extraordinary action was primarily the interaction of a particular cap price with two problems, both fossil-fuel related: the large increases in price of natural gas and coal due to the Ukraine war, and coal supply problems at several generators due to widespread east coast flooding resulting under the influence of La Niña . Most Australian gas and black coal is exported, so the domestic market is exposed to the internationally traded price. The gas prince increase in particular was so severe that the short-run marginal cost of gas electricity generators was above the administered price cap value. The widespread flooding also, somewhat ironically, constrained the output of some hydro generators as well, because there was no capacity downstream for more water release.

Certainly there are strong market design lessons from this, but they're around price caps and bidding behaviour. They're unrelated to the regional or nodal pricing concept which this thread was about (and there isn't really a renewable energy angle on this either).

Still don't know what brownouts you're referring to, and I follow the NEM pretty closely.

Bullshit. The Australian example best demonstrates that selling off production and networks to private companies, whilst trying to create an artificial market that constrains a monopoly chokehold on a product with inelastic demand is very difficult to pull off.

(Most of) Australia's problem is that the government stuck its head in the sand for a decade and pretended that renewables weren't happening. Consequently minimal groundwork was done by preparing the grid with suitable transmission and storage. Now it's being overtaken by the inevitable: renewables displacing coal/gas because they are cheaper to build and run. There will be a period of pain whilst the missing groundwork is done but it will get there.

I say "most of" as South Australia is showing how it can be done, with over 70% of its energy coming from renewables whilst not being blessed with hydro [1].

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-grid-with-the-mo...

> Consequently minimal groundwork was done by preparing the grid with suitable transmission and storage.

You mean like putting in the worlds largest battery?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve?useski...

You're reaching levels or reality denial I've only seen in republican administrations projections about peace in the middle east.

As noted in your link Hornsdale Power Reserve is in South Australia, which is what the parent used as a good example of preparation.

Yes, and it had enough backup to run the grid for 5 minutes, at the low low price of $200m. Now you'd only need another $50,000,000 to have enough storage to run it overnight.

> the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it

I know I just don't understand the details but I'm always kinda confused about how hard it seems to be to dump excess power off the grid. Is it just really hard to build something that can use enough power even when it doesn't need to do any useful work?

It is starting to come. People already schedule their car charging when it is cheap. But it does not get built over night.

But, due to the lack of transmission, and the 'single price' scheme, this power isn't cheap. It's expensive, but there is too much of it in one region only.

> Is it just really hard to build something that can use enough power even when it doesn't need to do any useful work?

It's just easier to not produce it. The issue with building up the grid is investment, but there is little marginal cost to turn off an existing plant.

That makes sense. You'd think they'd have prioritised this and have it done by now though. Both the new payment system and extra transmission capacity.

It seems absurd to me that spending $10B on a transmission cable from Africa to the UK is more sensible than spending that amount to make a much shorter cable to southern Europe and increasing capacity at bottlenecks along the way (including within the UK). That takes a lot more cross-governmental cooperation, of course.

> Increasing capacity at bottlenecks along the way

This would presumably amount to building a slightly shorter but nevertheless very long cable on/under land. And I think it's much easier to just drop a cable under the sea than it is to dig and bury it under the ground or build pylons to carry it above the ground.

This is true. In my experience constructing additional pylons is always a bottleneck.

Not necessarily. The shortest maritime path crosses at least one country maritime economic exclusive area, that will have to agree on that, without reaping any meaningful benefit. Plugging by land is easier to negotiate, maintain and finance, as the connection can also be used by those countries. I'd guess the reason this isnt being done that way is both because the UK left the EU and the whole Gibraltar debacle. I may be wrong on this, but the whole thing just looks like UK being UK - trying to solve their problems while ignoring the rest of the world exists.

I think building new subsea power transmission is cheaper per mile than building over land.

If you need to upgrade most of the links along the way, then building the longest possible cable at sea makes sense.

There might also be plans to tap off this cable to feed into portugal, spain, france and ireland along the way - that allows the cable to also take the role of some of the local transmission grid

The UK has built a huge amount of offshore wind generation - in fact it had the most in the world until quite recently, and is currently second only to China. This just isn't a complete solution because wind is intermittent, and in particular it tends to drop off to nearly nothing during the coldest parts of winter when energy demand is at its highest. All of the solutions to this are about as speculative and questionable as this proposal.

I very much dislike how these posts often result in a very predicable "but nuclear..." binary argument.

Here is a crazy idea: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Try to do both.

This project only addresses 8% of UK needs, plenty of room for other sources in the portfolio.

How is this a bad thing?

It depends. Hopefully they source say 150% of requirements and not max them out so that losing 8% takes you yo 142% and not a single led gets dimmed. Redundancy. But I also read how it is hard to stop / start generating power on demand so it might be costly to have so much redundancy.

You just don’t scale nuclear power up and down. You run at full capacity all of the time outside of maintenance shutdowns.

If you shut down or reduce power at all, you essentially have to wait two days to turn back on.

There’s a decay chain of isotopes that only stick around a couple of days which are normally burned off by neutrons when the reactor is running which build up when you turn the reactor off. They eat up neutrons making the rector much harder to control until they decay naturally. In order to restart the reactor you essentially have to double the output for a while and slowly very carefully reduce it at just the right rate… and if you make mistakes the reactor melts down.

This xenon poisoning was part of the Chernobyl disaster where operator actions and mistakes causing it and then their responses and mechanical failures led to the meltdown.

Rectors are just not designed to do this because it’s too risky and complicated to be worth it. So when you stop the reactor it just stays stopped for a couple of days. Similar for any throttling down which I understand is done carefully in some circumstances but absolutely not continually to respond to demand.

We have perfectly good reactor designs that can go down to half power or even lower without problems, and that's plenty of scaling. And they can scale in real time too. The biggest issue is that it increases the average cost per watt, which is not that big of an issue.

Are any of them in commercial operation?

The capex is so high and fuel cost so low it just also doesn’t make economic sense to ever turn down your reactor. Or you have to be overproducing to the extent that there is a significant negative price for electricity for quite a while before the cost makes sense.

> Are any of them in commercial operation?

"French utility EDF began making its nuclear plants more “maneuverable” in the 1980s, and today it says a 1,300-MW reactor can increase or decrease its output by 900 MW within about 30 minutes."

> The capex is so high and fuel cost so low it just also doesn’t make economic sense to ever turn down your reactor. Or you have to be overproducing to the extent that there is a significant negative price for electricity for quite a while before the cost makes sense.

Sure, the price of power has to temporarily go negative to be worth it in a market-based system. I don't know about "significant" though. That's not a problem for grid stability, it just means your cost/benefit calculation gets more complicated.

> If they could just be self-sufficient with a load of nuclear power plants

Given that most countries don't have a source of uranium, I don't see how this is any better from a geopolitical security perspective.

From my understanding you don't need a lot of uranium to run reactors for quite a while. That's one of the reason it is such a promising lead.

An unfortunate part of human cognition is we're pretty bad at assessing small but widespread and constant risks/damages so the impact of pollution pales in comparison to the mental impact of singular events like the various nuclear disasters or near misses we've had between TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima, et al. So they receive outsized push back compared to their actual reduced risk. (Also to be fair when a nuclear disaster does happen it renders an area unusable for a lot longer so the events tend to stick in people's memories)

Building them is also unfortunately a many decades long endeavor so we need shorter timeline solutions to bend the curve of climate change. I think a lot of environmentalists have also been burned by long term projects that sit in planning and approval hell for years to decades then get cancelled or funding redirected when a new administration decides to try to make their mark on a project. A similar thing has hampered NASAs Moon and Mars programs where options are pursued and cancelled constantly. SLS is not the first plan for a Moon return NASA has worked on for years it's just the first one that managed to spread the pork around enough to avoid cancellation.

> Building them is also unfortunately a many decades long endeavor

That’s only true now. We used to build them in a few years.

That's partially a bureaucratic and political issue but also designs are also much more complex than the were during the glory years.

You can stock it though, in case foreign countries cut supply short you're not suddendly out of power but instead have time to plan a negotiation or attempt to source it from elsewhere.

Not so great when the foreign powers decide to bomb the nuclear reactors though.

Or cut the cable.

Anyone capable of bombing a nuclear reactor in the UK would just nuke the UK so a reactor doesn't really play into it

I don't think that's a realistic problem.

At least uranium can be stockpiled.

Uranium is a mineral and can be purchased from many places and stored then used as needed.

15 countries mining it currently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...

There are also more countries with estimated reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

While an undersea cable requires continuous operation and the agreement from a single country where it starts. If they suddenly decide for whatever reason to turn it off (say they're short of electricity) then the supply is immediately stopped.

Equally relevant only 13 countries are fabricating nuclear fuel rods.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

You could use a CANDU PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor) if supply chain safety is that important to you, but don't want an enrichment industry. CANDU reactors can use natural Uranium.

Sweden do have uranium in the ground and could be mining it, but they created a law forbidding it.

The UK presumably does, as it maintains nuclear weapons.

The UK does not mine its own uranium though. There used to be a uranium mine in Cornwall but it stopped mining in 1930.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country)

If the issue is just geopolitical independence, it's easy to stockpile uranium reserves. I believe France has several years worth of uranium stockpiled, so even if relations soured with all of our providers, which are pretty diverse, we would have a few years to react.

Some people don't like nuclear power plants and somehow that's more important to them than national/energy security.

UK (and France) already have the bomb; going renewable here rather than nuclear has nothing to do with proliferation. I don't see how (for the UK) it's anything except people's feelings are hurt by nuclear power plants.

For the rest of Europe maybe it's about proliferation. And maybe economies of scale make tagging along cheaper than local nuclear for Britain.

Pure cost. Paying Hinkley Point C $150/MWh for 35 years is just bonkers waste of money. Flamanville 3 is a similarly amazing project.

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

Average electricity prices (edit/correction: in dense urban areas) in the U.S. are ~$250/mwh

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Which includes the transmission grid. Nuclear costs that, and then you have to build a grid.

Your chart shows residential prices for the total us average ~$140/MWh, not $250/MWh.

Plus, this is the total cost including transmission and distribution, which is roughly half the retail cost. Generation costs average less than $70/MWh, including expensive peaking power in the average.

You want to compare the £150/MWh to generation costs of the alternatives in the UK, which are a fraction of £150.

> generation costs of the alternatives in the UK

I'm all for renewable or nuclear energy, whatever's cheaper/strategic. As long as it's not burning fossil fuels.

On- and off-shore wind plus storage is going to be a lot cheaper than nuclear, as well this massive transmission line. Hell, at £150/MWh, I bet that solar+storage is cheaper in the dreary parts of the UK.

Maybe Rolls Royce will figure out cheap SMR nuclear, but that won't deploy until late 2030s, I would guess, if it does work.

We are fortunate to have good carbon free alternatives to nuclear, after decades of hard work by renewable technologists. It's real tech.

Yet the spot price of power has been over £150/MWh for most of the last year...

That deal is starting to look pretty good for the government...

A haphazard continent-wide transition from Russian gas, and all we get is nuclear prices for power? So to get it straight, you are proposing that we always should have an energy crisis in Europe?

The futures market, even 5 years out, doesn't show a return to old prices.

It looks like the market doesn't expect russian gas to ever return.

Like an addon of $10-20/MWh. That does not pay for a nuclear plant.

Generation cost !== retail all the way to the consumer cost. The latter is always going to be higher, just like all other goods and services.

I believed the strike was under £100 and cost overruns were to be paid by EDF?

Was there a contract change?

£92.50/MWh in 2012 prices is £122/MWh today. Convert to USD.

The UK is currently developing 12GW of nuclear power plants, and it is not exactly going great.

Hinkley Point C was originally quoted for £16 billion in 2012, which rose to £20.3 billion when construction started in 2017. It has been under construction for 6 years, they are 3 years behind schedule, and the cost is up to £32.7 billion.

Sizewell C is allowed to start construction and was scheduled to do so in 2021, but they haven't been able to finance it. Moorside was cancelled because Toshiba pulled out of the project, and Hitachi pulled out of the Wylfa B and Moorside plants leading to them getting shelved.

Not to mention that they are very controversial from an economic perspective. Hinkley Point C has a strike price of £92.5/MWh, while recent offshore wind projects have a strike price of £39.65/MWh.

In practice this means the consumer will end up paying to turn off wind turbine in order to run nuclear. It just doesn't make economic sense.

The UK has been valiantly trying to build new nuclear, but it's hard to find anybody that can do it, and it's unbelievably expensive if it even does get built.

I think that there was a narrow window in time where labor costs were low enough for nuclear to make sense, but in more advanced economies, highly labor intensive energy sources, as required by nuclear construction, are no longer viable. Advanced manufacturing capabilities have eclipsed construction technology.

On the money. Nuclear is too expensive and fragile, especially in this political environment. Also much more susceptible to sabotage in the event of a war, which is becoming a more relevant reality.

Most countries are small and have to choose between being neighborly but dependent or self-sufficient but much more modest.

The UK, for example, imports nearly half of its food.

> It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy.

Versus going across international borders for most other aspects of their economy? if the UK stopped international trade it would completely collapse anyway.

I fully agree with nuclear fusion power plants, but there is so much free solar power that is currently being “wasted”. Nuclear fusion reactors are many decades away and hopefully that’s when our global power problems will be (hopefully) solved :-)

This is exactly why France went all-in on nuclear in the 20th century.

(That, and nuclear weapon ambitions.)

And learned a very expensive lesson in negative learning by doing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

I wouldn't say the lesson was expensive for France, we've enjoyed cheap energy for decades due to this buildup.

The conclusion of this study isn't that France made a costly mistake, it is that it is extremely delusional to forecast ever-increasing efficiency gains when deploying a new technology.

I wouldn't be surprised if the very same lesson was learned by countries planning to go full-renewable.

Either you pay on the tax bill or electricity bill. France chose tax bill.

That's an often repeated falsehood. While there are costs shouldered by the public [1][2], they are similar to what any industry gets. In the following, I compare 2013 costs with the 400TWh produced in 2013:

* Research costs, which are partly funded by private companies and partly funded by the state. These projects currently don't focus on the current infrastructure but on potential new projects. Same as any domain, before a new industry can exist, there's research to be done. With about 784M€ [2] in 2013, that's just under 2€ per MWh. Spending was always within that order of magnitude ever since 1957.

* The surveilance authority is publicly funded, just like any regulatory body. In 2013, it cost about 217M€ [2] which is about 0.5€ per MWh.

So, as you can see, the money spent by the state on nuclear energy in 2013 barely registers compared to the power produced by nuclear plants the same year.

[1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/themat...

[2] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/201405..., p. 135-146

EDF is essentially the state nuclear energy, which has been talks of being renationalized.

> A price cap on energy for French consumers hit EDF profits hard but so did the enforced closure of many of its of nuclear power stations for repairs.

> The losses are the third biggest in French corporate history and the worst for more than 20 years.

> EDF's debts have spiralled to €64.5bn.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64674131

> EDF's debts have spiralled to €64.5bn.

That's peanuts for decades of cheap energy for tens of millions of people and businesses.

If it was 10x that number then there might be a point.

Dude, you're talking about taxes, I tell you what ends up on my tax bill.

Now you're telling me that EDF is essentially the state. Sure, but that's pretty much like my own company is essentially me. There are still two separate bank accounts, and clear rules and proper accounting about what goes from one account to the other. That's why I can tell precisely what is on my tax bill and what is on my utilities bill.

My point was that the "EDF is subsidized, a large part of your energy bill is paid by your tax bill" claim is wrong.

Now if you want my opinion about our current (and past) government and how they mismanage EDF and ruin the legacy they received, I can go on for hours. That's unrelated to nuclear, though.

This planned link is very long distance, but UK is still part of a European power grid: it's normal for power lines to cross national (or State) borders.

If I were a planner, I'd go for both.

Impossible in capitalism or with modern politics, but I planning for failure makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't mind having a power grid support 2x capacity.

Same for food, medicine, and general-purpose manufacturing (e.g. machine shops), for that matter.

The electricity actually _has to_ go _somewhere_. You could make a lot of batteries but double usage every day would build up fast

The market will compensate for it.

We might end up seeing peaker plants. We might see companies taking advantage of the price difference to cheaply run energy-intensive industry like aluminium smelting. We might see companies trying to take advantage of the price difference by building storage batteries. We might even end up incentivizing consumers to shift their usage patterns by providing cheaper electricity during low-demand periods.

Power plants can be kept offline.

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