Yup but you won’t be paying less than £0.30/kWh flat-rate pretty soon.
Hinkley is stupidly expensive and I doubt the capacity factor will turn out any better than wind and batteries, but I still think we should build a few more nuclear power stations - the public will turn hard against renewables at the first sniff of power outages being caused because the wind wasn’t blowing, and we’re less likely to run into that with some nuclear baseload in the mix.
Yes, that's what all the people who like fossil fuels and Putin say anyway.
But everyone else has responded by accelerating the renewable plans that those same Putin and Fossil apologists kept blocking for whatever reason, so it might work out okay in the end.
Would have been nice just to have 4 decades of sensible climate action, cleaner air, healthier citizens, less terrorism, cheaper energy, warmer homes and no-one threatening to nuke Europe when they lose an Illegal war of conquest of part of it though.
u do understand that most of the "renewable" model is to use gas/coal when there isnt wind or sun? guess who backed it... putin, biden and all the others ones that did not have nuclear as their main tech
No the model is to have energy storage and phase out all fossil fuels. Using gas peakers is an intermediate step, but the plan is not to increase the amount of gas used, but instead to electrify processes that currently use gas (e.g. heating).
im highly interested. how do you store energy on a worldwide scale? what kind of technology will you use for storage and what are the implications of building/maintaining those storage facilities.
From what I hear there are several options, most promising seems to be a combination of some sort of batteries for buffering a few hours at most and Hydrogen for seasonal storage. Googling will probably provide you with several studies on how to do stable grids with 100% renewables, I know I've seen at least two in the past.
ok what do you need (in terms of materials) to build a battery to store such energy and what would it like on a global scale? once you found the answer you might not want to call it renewable energy except if child labor in lithium mines and rare minerals from china are renewable.
wind is an intermittent energy at best. a turbine lasts at best 25 years then you can't recycle it. there is nothing you can renew in wind energy. oh and wind is changing so you might build it somewhere with a lot of wind just to find out its not there anymore a few years down. not even talking about the visual pollution it creates.
money is not an issue when building energy such as nuclear. you'd need to price all the outcomes a nuclear reactor would bring to your economy and trust me no industry will want to rely on wind to meet their production goals.
To approach nuclear-like capacity factors on wind+batteries you need an INSANE amount of batteries, £0.30/kWh will seem like a bargain in comparison. Wind lulls can last for weeks or longer. There is a reason why countries like Germany are so focused on hydrogen for storage.
How? Economics strongly suggest to run nuclear plants at maximum output whenever you can. So you wouldn't be able to use them as backups when there is a lack of wind power.
Hinkley is stupidly expensive and I doubt the capacity factor will turn out any better than wind and batteries, but I still think we should build a few more nuclear power stations - the public will turn hard against renewables at the first sniff of power outages being caused because the wind wasn’t blowing, and we’re less likely to run into that with some nuclear baseload in the mix.