Double Standard For Nuclear Energy & Wind Energy In UK?

November 9th, 2013 by Zachary Shahan

I’ll be honest — I’m not a “nuclear power hater.” But if you look at nuclear power objectively and calculate its costs — including insurance costs and waste management costs — it is simply a bad deal. It’s very, very expensive. The private industry would never develop nuclear on its own. The only way it gets built anywhere is from huge government support.

Dr David Toke, Reader in Energy Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, recently took a brief look at how nuclear power gets extra-special treatment from the UK government. First of all, he took a look at assumptions regarding the working lifetime of wind turbines vs nuclear reactors:

Ed Davey’s excuse for limiting wind power contracts to 15 years whilst Hinkley C gets a whopping 35 year contract is blown away by some elementary history checking. Lots of wind turbines in Altamont Pass – installed during the so-called Californian ‘windrush’ – are still turning after 31 years. Davey claims that the contracts he has awarded are in proportion to the technologies’ design life expectancy. Yet the Altamont turbines will be turning until 2015, a 33 year lifetime, and only then taken down because of a repowering exercise, and also modern planning conditions which they did not have back in 1982. See http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/23757. I am given to understand by a leading authority on the subject that it is likely that quite a few machines built in the early 1980s are expected to carry on running past 2015….

Certainly one can expect modern wind turbines to last a lot longer than these efforts right at the start of the modern windmill era.

So using the Davey formula (about 60 per cent of lifetime as a contract length), using even 33 years as an example, wind power should get a 20 year contracts, not 15. But if this happened, the ‘strike price’ for wind (£95 per MWh at year 2018) would be reduced below that set for Hinkley C.This would breed trouble as the UK Government tries to claim that they are giving the same incentives to renewables as nuclear to pass through the EU’s state-aid regulations (see previous blog post).

Dave then touched on the under-discussed issue of nuclear power loan guarantees:

Then there is the loan guarantee for Hinkley C, all £10 billion of it, that constitutes 65 per cent of the capital cost of the 3.2GW development. If wind power got such guarantees, their costs could be reduced much further as well, since the borrowing costs would be a lot less. Indeed borrowing costs could be reduced by at least 2 per cent – which makes a big difference to the economics of wind power.

And then he did a simple calculation on what the overall price effect would be from if two things were made the same for wind power as they are for nuclear power:

I have calculated what the effects of these two changes – increasing the contract length from 15 years to 20 years, and giving loan guarantees for 65 per cent of the capital costs. The result is that if this was applied to wind power then a strike price of £75 would be the equivalent of the £95 per MWh the Government is offering wind power from 2018. This figure is considerably less than what the Government is giving to Hinkley C.

Dave included much more in the full article, including some comparisons with pricing in Germany, so check that out for more.

Keep up to date with all the hottest cleantech news by subscribing to our (free) cleantech newsletter, or keep an eye on sector-specific news by getting our (also free) solar energy newsletter, electric vehicle newsletter, or wind energy newsletter.

Tags: nuclear subsidies, UK, UK nuclear, UK Nuclear Energy, UK Wind Energy

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

Bob_Wallace

This Hughes POS crops up from time to time. Pro-coal/nuclear people try to use it to discredit wind.

There’s another piece of data which is actually correct but is misused. Some European wind farms are being repowered after 15 years or so.

That is not due to turbine failure, but advances in turbine size/technology combined with limited real estate resources. It’s paying to take down smaller, shorter rigs and replacing them with much taller, larger swept area units.

Those removed turbines are refurbished and sold on to countries with larger wind resources and less capital to invest in energy production. It’s a good way to increase wind penetration in Europe and a great way to get some wind supply up and running in less developed countries.

Watch for people claiming that Germany’s/whosoever turbines have worn out after 10-15 years and have to be replaced. It’s a convenient lie.
John Tucker

Wind and solar cannot operate 24/7. So this article is arguing for mixed fossil fuels as well.

Nuclear power is a better deal.
- Bob_Wallace
  
  In order to match supply to demand both wind/solar and nuclear need storage.
  Nuclear is roughly 3x as expensive as wind/solar. Adding the cost of storage to both still leaves nuclear vastly more expensive.
  - Grad
    
    Also, sea level rise and consumption of river water (especially when drought conditions) may become an ever bigger problem for nuclear.
    - CaptD
      
      Good point that is never mentioned when pro-nuclear proponents discuss safety, especially in the decades of NPP operations. There were even a few close calls in the USA during the last year when river flooding raised many safety concerns!
- Wayne Williamson
  
  No John, this article is stating that a wind installations output decrease significantly by 10 years…I do not see it in the stats….
- CaptD
  
  Sorry John, Nuclear is in reality, only a “good deal” for the Utilities and their shareholders that own them because ratepayers have to pay for everything, even mis-management (like the debacle that occurred at San Onofre NPP which left ratepayers holding a multi-billion dollar bill) and that does not even include decommissioning which has its own set of huge expenses which will continue “forever”.
  
  In short, nuclear is no longer fiscally acceptable, if it was then these Utilities would fund them themselves instead on requiring Gov’t. guarantees!
phrasing

There is little point in subsidizing windmills for more than 15 years.

The average lifespan of a windmill in the UK is 12 to 15 years [1].

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9770837/Wind-farm-turbines-wear-sooner-than-expected-says-study.html
- Matt
  
  Ok someone is smoking it.
  1) Above claims UK uses 15 years your link 20-25 (that sound exact) for calcualtions.
  2) Why do wind mills in CA last so much longer than those in UK?
  3) The one item in the link that did read true, was that if you place turbine too close together they don’t as well if they are space correctly.
  - heinbloed
    
    ” Why do wind mills in CA last so much longer than those in UK? ”
    
    And why do they last hundreds of years around the Northsea ( that’s where Denmark is) ?
    
    This one was blown down during the recent stormy weather, it was errected in 1692 and repowered in 1856, the local historian club renovated it last year again:
    
    http://www.nonstopnews.de/meldung/17779
    
    picture gallery:
    
    http://www.nonstopnews.de/galerie/17779
    
    There are many Danish windmills standing since centuries as well.
    
    To get to an average life-time of ten years (see the Telegraph’s trash-data) would mean that new windmills get blown away within hours after installation ? Must be British …:)
    - Bob_Wallace
      
      Here’s what Hughes claimed –
      
      “the efficiency rating of a turbine based on the percentage of electricity it actually produces compared with its theoretical maximum — is reduced from 24 per cent in the first 12 months of operation to just 11 per cent after 15 years.
      
      I’ve posted some annual performance data for combined wind farms. Let me post some for individual wind farms. See if you can spot a decline toward 11% after 15 years.
      
      What one can see is that 2010 was a relatively poor wind year which dropped annual output for older and newer wind farms.
      
      And that as wind technology improves the annual performance (CF) of wind farms is increasing.
      
      Did Hughes draw a straight line from year 1 through 2010 and project a drop to 11%? If so, he would have to put his thumb over the 2011 CF.
      - Martin Vermeer
        
        Gordon Hughes is with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a well-known liars’ club apparently expanding into wind power. Debunkings are not hard to find, e.g.
        
        http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2012/10/22/43139/909
        http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2012/12/20/181630/07
        
        …and why anyone would quote the Telegraph with a straight face as a source for anything at all also escapes me.
      - Bob_Wallace
        
        Thanks. I got a lot of my original information about Hughes from Jerome.
        We have people showing up here (and on other green tech sites) trying to “educate” us using erronous information from very low quality sources. One wonders if they are intentionally spreading lies or whether they are so stupid that they actually believe the stuff they read/hear from those sources.
- Wayne Williamson
  
  The article mentions a report, but there is no mention of who created the report or at least a link to it. I also see most of the comments very anti wind…
  - JamesWimberley
    
    It was by Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University; see here: http://www.ref.org.uk/publications/280-analysis-of-wind-farm-performance-in-uk-and-denmark The study is an outlier, and its pessimistic conclusion has clearly been rejected by many large investors in wind like Warren Buffett. There has been considerable improvement in wind turbine design and maintenance practice since the few early installations on which Hughes’ historical analysis relies – clashing with experience at Altamont, as Toke says. When GE claims a 20-year design life for its turbines, it incurs a legal liability to sharp-toothed and well-lawyered investors like Buffett; should we disbelieve both?
    
    The performance drop Hughes records can’t be due to the towers and rotor blades, and can presumably be fixed with a partial rebuild of the generator and gearbox. This would cost far less than a new turbine. Though sometimes it’s a better deal to rebuild completely on the same site.
    - Bob_Wallace
      
      Hughes reports that Danish and UK wind farms drop performance significantly after 15 or so years. Here’s how the data plots out for those wind farms.
      
      These are the data points plotted from the database cited in Hughes’s report. He engages in some sort of statistical voodoo to show that the wind farms are failing after 10-15 years. People who have tried to figure out his math state that it does not calculate.
      - Wayne Williamson
        
        Yeah, I spent several hours reviewing the stats on the website and I could not figure out where he got those numbers…
      - Bob_Wallace
        
        I downloaded the database and started plotting out the oldest UK wind farms. I found no drop in performance after ten years after I had plotted about ten farms. Then I found that someone had plotted them all in the graph above so I quit.
        
        Hughes claim is bull.
- Bob_Wallace
  
  That claim comes from a bogus report published on an anti-wind web site.
  
  Just try to find any data that supports it.
  
  Hughes wrote some real garbage that the data base he cites does not support.
  - John Tucker
    
    All wind usually requires a complete overhaul in 10 years.
    - Bob_Wallace
      
      Sorry, John. That is completely incorrect.