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This cheap wind power

Of course, wind power is variable, unlike the steady power provided by nuclear, so there are costs to the energy system of integrating all those new turbines. But experts say those costs are relatively negligible, especially if coupled with flexible and smart technologies such as batteries, which the government is backing with hundreds of millions of pounds.

Deploying a technology we don’t even have yet is going to have relatively negligible costs?

17 thoughts on “This cheap wind power”

  1. Sounds like my leftie mates.

    Graduates, many civil servants or similar, believers in extreme equality of outcomes and deniers of reality!!

  2. Bloke in North Dorset

    Batteries are full of nasty chemicals and when the world is full of them they are going to cause a disposal problem on a par with with nuclear. How mush of that has been factored in to the costs?

  3. If climate change was the real thing that people who claim it as a real thing claim, then nuclear would be a major part of the deployed solution.

    The fact so many who claim to believe in climate change are against the use of nuclear is saying something we should listen too, especially when their preferred solutions are almost entirely science fiction.

  4. @ BiND
    Storage means building a dozen new Dinorwigs, not a warehouse-full of Ever Ready or Duracell batteries. Major problem being that there’s only a handful of potential sites in the UK and between them all – even if the protectors of the local environment didn’t block them – they would not provide enough capacity to cope with a renewables-only power system.

  5. Anything can have an apparent negligible cost if taxpayers have already been squeezed to pay for it. Batteries *are* the flexibility enabler not some nice to have extra.

  6. Is it going to make my leccy bill smaller. No. It’s bollocks. When enough people wake up to this we can start hanging the bastards who’ve forced this on us.

  7. If you want to use subsidies to encourange electricity manufacturers to enter the market to ensure there’s enough electricity available, while also being concerned about that electricity being cheap enough for consumers to buy, it should be done at the consumer end instead of the supplier end with something like a negative fuel VAT rate, so Big Wind gets to sell its electrons for 94p but the consumer pays 23p for them.

    Otherwise, you are simply saying that your policy is driven by wanting to make electricity too expensive for poor people to afford.

  8. Batteries cannot fix intermittency. They can buffer it, but never fix it.

    “flexible and smart technologies such as batteries, upon which the government is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds”

    FIFY

  9. @ Gamecock
    Actually Norway’s pumped storage system will cope for Norway and – jointly with Sweden’s nuclear power stations – for Denmark.
    Unfortunately the UK doesn’t have the potential capacity for pumped storage to do this.

  10. If we are willing to still use carbon it’s cheap to store RE electricity for when we need it. It’s a lot cheaper to store predictable electricity, like we get from nuclear, but that isn’t the generation capacity being installed. The hydrogen buffer required to make RE stable enough for an efficient Sabatier reaction is roughly a third of the total system cost*.

    * For the design option using atmospheric CO2 capture.

  11. Sorry, glanced at the wrong numbers. The hydrogen buffer for the 0.2l/m hydrogen Sabatier reactor is $32k. The rest of this particular system is $23k*. I looked at the hydrogen buffer line costs for the 300W system.

    * This only includes the materials. Calculating labor is impossible at phase in development.

  12. @John77
    Storage means building a dozen new Dinorwigs
    Actually, it’s far worse than that, more like several hundred Dinorwigs. Dinorwig (10GWhr) was designed to provide a couple of extra GW to the National Grid for a few hours – not to supply the entire country for four windless, freezing days in January (50 hours x 30GW).

  13. @ Chris Miller
    I said “a dozen new Dinorwigs” because there are only about a dozen sites in the UK where we could build a smaller version of Dinorwig.
    I did say that they wouldn’t be enough, but I had forgotten that it was by an order of magnitude so I failed to make that point – thanks for reminding me.

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