Total cost for the wind farm is probably around 20-ish billion $, but the lifetime is likely shorter than the reactor (possibly less than half!).
It's surprising to me that the reactor at $35billion is still competitive, cost-wise, with the offshore wind farm.
Lifetime cost will be much lower - near 0 staff - no anti-terrorism policing operation - no fuel. If it were onshore, cost would be significantly cheaper and would be able to scale onto the grid and generate revenue (nearly) one turbine at a time as they are installed which makes a massive difference for financing and servicing a debt.
Cost wise certainly not orders of magnitude difference, and it is competitive. The sensible non partisan thinkers out there know it isn't a choice of building one or the other, you build both.
Maintenance cost for offshore wind is NOT negligible. This is possibly as high as the reactor maintenance cost already by itself. Then, for a fair comparison, you would also have to add costs for improving grid connectivity and/or local battery storage...
I'm not arguing for more nuclear power btw, just honestly suprised that the expensive reactor is somewhat competitive, still...
GE's 170 full-time turbine servicing jobs for Dogger Bank phases A, B and C will be based out of the Port of Tyne. That is more staff than I would have guessed, one worker for every 1.6 turbines!
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2022/10/19/very-intense-r...
Decomissioning the offshore wind turbines could get into the same range though, assuming £400M per installed GW (nameplate), this would be £3.2Bn
Numbers need to be taken with a large grain of salt.
The best I could find was a document by the National Audit Office from 2017 (using 2016 estimates); page 18, figure 2 - The expected costs of Hinkley Point C.
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...
Back then the construction was estimated at £18.2 billion. Ongoing operation costs (including fuel, staffing, and grid charges) were priced at £29.3 billion and decommissioning (without the uplift) at £7.3 billion. Total project cost was put at £54.8 billion.
Again, it was from 2017 so things have changed.
Handling and disposing on the used fuel is 4.4B GBP (or 73M GBP per year of running, or 2.6 GBP per MWh of electricity). Cheap!
Is the operation cost of the reactor over such a long duration not significant?
Also why are you comparing 8gw to 3.2gw? Is it due to peek output? if so won't this be solved by grid level storage?
Yes. Also because maintenance costs are probably somewhat similar-- offshore turbines are still mechanical systems in a very unpleasant environment, after all.
> Also why are you comparing 8gw to 3.2gw? Is it due to peek output? if so won't this be solved by grid level storage?
Yes-- the turbines give you 8GW, but only 40% of the time. Reactor gives you its ~3GW basically all the time. This difference would NOT be erased by storage-- you would need the storage on top of the windpower, but it is not trivial to tell how much storage you really need (electrical grid connectivity can also somewhat compensate, or large consumers that only turn on when energy is cheap...).
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/20/giant-windf...
What are the reasons behind believing prices will reduce further?
> I'm guessing Nuclear won't see the same level of changes
Parsons says the second reactor is being built 20% more quickly than the first one.
Parsons says he expects that Sizewell will be built between 20% and 30% faster than the second Hinkley reactor.
Economies of scale and room for technological/process innovation. The fact that solar reduced so significantly and battery costs too. This article seems a bit cherry picked about a specific project and not a global trend in costs. Offshore will naturally take time to become competitive since it requires complex installation and processes, but those seem like solvable problems for an admittedly laymen as myself.
This applies when going from 1 to 2 to 4 reactors.
See https://www.oecd-nea.org/mdep/events/conf-2023/presentations... page 27 for the Chinese approach to HPR1000 (Hualong One) innovation.
Plus the linked article mentioned improvements to manufacturing outside the constraints of the containment.
Even the most catastrophic nuclear projects are competitive if not better than the best renewable projects.
Yeah, I know this sounds like frothing-at-the-mouth nuclear fanboiism, but run the numbers!
I did, and once I did I started sounding like a frothing-at-the-mouth nuclear fanboi.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper. In 30 years it might cost much less. How can Nuclear compete?
A factory built plant or any economies of scale.
Start a company with a mobile workforce and go country to country building 5 or more large scale reactors in parallel in each country.
Small scale reactors (again factory built) are the other alternative. They would have to be installed in a 'farm' together for security reasons.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792
So perhaps 1B-2B USD a plant. 2,000,000,000/(60 * 1,600 * 365 * 24 * .9) = 2.6 USD/MWh
> Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper.
Why did the UK have to raise the maximum bid price for the Contract For Difference AR6? Wind farm costs have exploded, and turbine manufacturers are having reliability issues.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-are-issues-with...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vineyard-wind-incide...
Bidders have to sell the government the electricity at the strike price. They pushed up the strike price to £54.23/MWh from a previous of £37.35/MWh with a current market price of £70-£80/MWh.
Nobody was going to offer to sell electricity for £37.35 for the next 5 years in a market where you can currently sell it for £70 - £100 (and where you could sell it for £300-£500 when the crisis occurred in 2021 / 2022).
The beauty of the CfD scheme is that you can choose when to start using it. But once you're in you're in, you're in until the end of the 15 years.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/significant-commercial-incent....
In truth I think it will be a mug's game to build offshore wind without a CfD. See https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... for a view of what the day-ahead auction will turn into in a few years.