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Cost of Nuclear Energy Rising Out of Reach
by David McClellan - Aug 11th, 2008
in
A detailed cost comparison of nuclear versus wind energy shows that nuclear energy will soon no longer be cost competitive with wind energy if present trends continue.
While nuclear energy is regarded as one of the cheapest sources of power available -- given the enormous amount of energy released from the splitting of atoms -- and wind is considered relatively expensive, analysis of a number of current projects using publicly available data indicates that wind energy has closed the gap in price per kilowatt.
Furthermore, price trends are much less favorable for nuclear projects -- cost estimates of new nuclear plants have doubled and tripled in some instances in just one or two years. Prices for wind power are also rising, but at more pedestrian rates closer to 10% annually.
This is something well worth considering before welcoming a nuclear renaissance -- as ratepayers may be saddled with unaffordable bills and the nation may also end up with a large, unanticipated bill for the hidden cost of nuclear waste disposal.
I've reached this conclusion by crunching the numbers on one recent contract to build a nuclear plant in South Carolina, two proposed nuclear plants in Florida and new vendor estimates of the cost of nuclear construction going forward. I compared that data with a wind farm that would produce a comparable output of energy, relying on cost data from a Department of Energy report published this year.
The prevailing mantra on America's energy future is "let's keep all options on the table." I put two of them on the table and here's what I found. Put your wonk hat on as I take you through the numbers.
Nameplate Capacity v. Actual Capacity
When we read about energy deals for nuclear, wind or any other type of fuel source, we always read about the number of megawatts or gigawatts the new facility will produce. Unfortunately, that's not really an accurate number. The number quoted is what is called the "nameplate capacity," but that is different from the amount of energy the plant is actually going to produce. The nameplate capacity tells you only what the plant produces when it runs at the maximum possible rate. No plant, no matter the power source, runs at the maximum rate all the time. Sometimes it is running at full speed, sometimes it is shut down and quite often it is somewhere in between. In order to estimate the true cost of power generated from a facility, you have to make a calculation to find out how much power the facility can actually produce.
You do that by multiplying the nameplate capacity by something called the "capacity factor." The capacity factor tells you how well the plant does at turning the potential nameplate capacity into actual kilowatt hours. The factor varies widely among different plant types, and the differences are not trivial.
I was able to calculate the capacity factor for US nuclear plants for 2006, by combining data from two reports from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA). The first report covered existing generating capacity and the second reported actual generation. Although I've seen a 90% capacity factor published widely for nuclear power plants, the data in the reports I examined show that the capacity factor was actually 85%. That's still pretty good. As you will see, wind farms don't even come close in this regard.
Nuclear Cost Data
The data for the following discussion on nuclear plants comes from the economics page of the World Nuclear Association.
Let's start with the price to actually design and build the reactor and electrical generation: vendors call that the 'overnight cost' of a plant. The odd adjective, 'overnight' refers to the theoretical cost of building the nuclear plant at today's prices, in one night -- leaving out any inflation and financing expense over the course of the 5 or 10 years it actually takes to build the plant.
To the overnight cost, you then have to add what are called "owner's costs": land, lawyers and cooling towers among other things.
Then, you have to add what is surprisingly the single largest cost in nuclear construction: financing. It takes so long to construct a plant that interest on the borrowed money can easily be as much as 50% of the total cost.
All of these numbers may be reported in different contexts, sometimes even without identifying what is included. To understand the prices and do fair comparisons, it is particularly important to know if the quote for a nuclear proposal includes financing. That can as much as double the price.
I looked at the prices for three plants. The first was from a $9.8 billion deal made in May 2008 by South Carolina Electric and Gas for two 1.117 GW plants. The price included financing and owner's cost. They're scheduled to start operations in 2016 for the first plant and 2019 for the twin. To calculate the cost before financing, I conservatively assumed that financing would be 50% of the total, giving $4.9 billion.
In February of this year, Florida Power and Light (FPL) filed a proposal for twin plants to produce 2.2 GW total. The projected price was between $6.8 billion and $10 billion without financing. In March 2008, Progress Energy announced a plan, also for twin plants, to produce a total of 2.2 GW. Their price was $10.4 billion before financing costs.
Using these figures, I arrived at an average cost for a nuclear plant: $8 billion for 2.21 GW -- without financing costs included. The 2.21 GW rating refers, of course, to the nameplate capacity. So to know the actual production capacity, we'll need to multiply the 2.21 GW by the 85% capacity factor, which equals 1.88 GW.
In other words, through the course of the year, the plant will produce 1.88 GW hours of electricity on average every hour. The reality is that at some times it will be zero, other times it will be 2.21 GW and at other times it will be in between, but if you average it all, you'll get 1.88 GW.
Divide the $8 billion by 1.88 GW and you get $4.25 per watt of average actual generating capacity. Industry capital costs are more often reported as the price per kilowatt, so $4,255 per kW if you prefer. And remember, this is before financing costs.
Wind Numbers
Now, let's look at wind power. I calculated the capital costs for a theoretical wind farm that could produce the same output as the 2.21 GW nuclear plant, and to do this I used the projected 2008 prices from a report written by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the EIA. Tha report says it costs $1,920 per kilowatt of capacity. The report is the Annual Report on US Wind Power 2007.
But, let's not forget, we have to use a capacity factor to determine actual output, and for the wind, the capacity factor is much different. The capacity factor for wind projects varies much more than nuclear plants - I've seen the range reported as 20 - 45%. The capacity factor is improving for several reasons as I explained here. The EIA report also said that 25% of new 2007 wind turbines had a capacity factor greater than 40%, so I used a slightly higher than middle of the road figure of 35% for the capacity factor.
Given an actual output of 1.88 GW and a capacity factor of 35%, I worked backwards to calculate that a wind farm with nameplate capcity of 5.37 GW would be needed to produce the same amount of power as a 2.21 GW nuclear plant. At $1,920/kW, the capital costs of the wind farm would be $10.31 billion -- or $5.49/watt or $5,486/kW. That's 37% higher than our average nuke.
Nuclear vs Wind Power
We've left out the financing costs so far to be able to make a fair comparison with the cost of wind power. Now let's consider the financing. The average financing costs of the nuclear plants above is 71% of the pre-financing price. Add that into the mix and the nuclear price per kW becomes $7,276.
Unfortunately, I don't have a way to directly calculate financing costs for wind. Since wind turbines can be installed much closer to 'overnight' than a nuclear plant, the financing cost is not usually discussed as a part of the capital costs. For the same reason, we know that financing is not going to be nearly as big a factor for wind farms.
Put all these numbers together and it shows that the capital costs of nuclear and wind power are reasonably close, at least for now.
DealBreakers Not Included
To keep the comparison simple, well, at least less complicated than it might have been, I left out a few things:
Costs of new transmission lines were omitted because they will be project specifc. Most people know that these costs could be considerable if large wind farms are built in remote windy places, but they can also be significant for new nuclear projects. For instance the Progress Energy proposal described above also includes plans for an additional $3 billion on transmission lines in Florida for the new nuclear plant.
I also left out the price of long-term disposal of nuclear waste because there's really no way to know when, where or how much it might turn out to be. Still, there is cause for concern. A recent article pointed out the estimates for Yucca Mountain disposal have gone up considerably -- to $96 billion. There is a fund that ratepayers have been contributing to for years that will go some distance in paying the cost of Yucca or its alternative, but the Yucca effort will only dispose of waste from our current 104 plants and the defense program.
If the nation builds 45 new plants as John McCain recommends, it is fair to assume conservatively that there will an incremental cost of close to a billion dollars per plant for waste disposal. That price might well go down if we decide to allow spent fuel to be reprocessed, which is currently illegal. Reprocessing produces new fuel and can reduce the mass and volume of waste by 65%.
Nuclear development prices have also shot up in the last few years. For example, the estimate above by Progress Energy was triple their previous estimate made only one year earlier. In the middle of 2006, reactor vendors estimated the overnight costs at $1,500 - $2,000 per kW. This year, only two years later, they now estimate $3,000/kW. That excludes the owner's costs and financing.
Of course, wind power construction uses steel and concrete too and is subject to some of the same construction inflation as nuclear plants. But the turbine is the biggest cost element and as manfacturers build more of these, they will learn how to do it better. Turbine prices are likely to benefit from the mass production learning curve. As I reported here, the cost increase for windpower was about 9% last year and are estimated to be 12% this year.
Bottom line: Nuclear and wind energy right now -- from a purely financial perspective -- seem to be about neck and neck, but increasing capital costs and unknown disposal and security costs are quickly going to put nuclear energy out of reach if present trends continue.
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Nuclear and wind are both "baseload"!
Many nuclear supporters claim that nuclear power is especially valuable because it produces "baseload" power. The idea is that the power is "24/7", especially reliable, and matches the demand of a modern, industrial society unusually well, so it's more valuable than wind or than "peaking" power.
The reality is different, and a bit closer to the opposite than to this claim. When a System Operator decides how to make electrical supply and demand meet, the first generators "fired up" (or the last ones shut down) are the ones that have the lowest short-run incremental (or "avoidable") costs, or the ones that can't be shut down for non-financial reasons.
Wind (like PV solar) has zero short-run incremental (or "avoidable") costs, so it's about as "baseload" as any generation can be.
Nuclear has non-zero avoidable costs, but (a) they're much lower than those of all fossil-fueled generators, and (b) the technical and safety hassles from "load-following" with any present-day reactors are so severe that nuclear operators insist on having their power "dispatched" whenever it's humanly possible. For example, here in Ontario, when the grid has surplus baseload generation (currently only a few times a year), the decision is ALWAYS to spill water at Niagara Falls (Sir Adam Beck GSs) rather than to throttle back any of the nuclear stations. We throw away free fuel rather than face the hassles and hazards of nuclear load-following -- 'nuff said.
Effectively, both kinds of capacity -- wind and nuclear -- are "use it or lose it" commodities, dispatched whenever they are capable. Interestingly, both also have significant -- though different -- potential to be incapable or unreliable. Using straight "capacity factor" numbers, we see that wind is partly or completely unavailable much more often (60%-75% of the "curve") than nuclear (only 15% of the curve recently). But while the wind comes and go capriciously, nuclear is much more prone to becoming hugely unavailable for a very long time on very short notice than wind.
E.g., here in Ontario, we had eight commercial-scale reactors simultaneously and totally out of commission for almost 7 entire calendar years, for a combination of safety and management reasons. Needless to say, there were many, MANY delightfully windy days during those seven years!
A few years earlier, Ontario had a significant "de-rating" (due to the sudden realization of a design flaw known by the label "fuel-string relocation") that eliminated several reactors' worth of power for years.
Of course, the flip side of these "baseload" generators' tendency -- nuclear or wind -- to become UNavailable when the system really needs power, is their tendency to be fully available when the system doesn't, e.g., weekends, night-time, Spring and Fall, etc. Some of that problem can be mitigated with the scheduling of planned maintenance outages, but most of it remains. During those times, these generators generate low-value power, while most of us sleep, or vacation, etc.
Ironically, the most RELIABLE generating stations on most modern grids are stations with LOW capacity factors! That's because it's really important to a modern society to have a really reliable electrical grid. We accomplish that by having a substantial amount of extremely reliable generating capacity -- usually called "peaking" capacity -- in reserve, to keep the lights on when a reactor or two or three suddenly shut down, or the wind doesn't blow, or demand goes higher than forecast (e.g. a heat wave in the summer). Those stations -- usually fossil-fueled or "peaking hydroelectric" (built with extra water storage and extra turbine-generator capacity) -- usually have higher costs per MWh, but they also control their timing carefully so they generate when electricity is most in demand, and most valuable per MWh. But that's not nearly "24/7", so their annual capacity-factor numbers are low, or occasionally even zero.
Again, back to Ontario, the government has decided to outlaw the use of coal to generate electricity after 2014 -- regardless of cost, regardless of alternatives, regardless of emissions, Thou Shalt Not. Originally the date was 2007, then 2009, and now it's 2014. (It seems to be politically popular as long as it's not too soon.) But the coal-fired plants are among the most reliable generators we have, and many of them work in peaking mode, with very low coal combustion (and emissions) but huge benefits to the reliability of the system. (I don't know why the government thinks that the environment wants to see a never-used coal-fired station replaced with a brand-new never-used GAS-fired station, but that's the level of intelligence we're dealing with. We're also planning to shut down some of North America's cleanest coal stations. And we're keeping the rest really dirty, because it's not cost-effective to clean them up, since we're planning -- maybe -- to shut them down in a few years!)
There's no way we can replace those coal-fired plants with either wind or nuclear capacity, and duplicate the present reliability of the grid. You can't replace our reliable and dispatchable generators with capricious and "needy" generators, unless you want to have a third-world grid. The good news is that the government and the Ont. Power Authority have accepted that simple fact, and are proposing "only"(!) to rebuild our current nuclear capacity as it shuts down, and to build gas-fired capacity to replace most of the coal-fired capacity. But many commentators -- and even one opposition party in the last provincial election -- talk loosely and foolishly about "replacing coal with new nuclear" as if that were an option.
In terms of this study, it would be nice to calculate the value of nuclear and wind capacity in a more sophisticated way than just by guessing average forecast capacity factors. Of course, the most sophisticated way is simply to leave the math to willing investors, risking their own money on unsubsidized "merchant" generating capacity that will sell electricity into the marketplace, at the investors' risk. If the generators can find customers willing to sign contracts for their power (wind would, nuclear might), that works, too.
Unfortunately, Ontario's experiment with an electricity marketplace was abruptly (and more-or-less permanently) ended when then Premier Ernie Eves panicked during a hot summer and fall and froze electricity prices, and none of us may live long enough to see us recover from that panic. So we have a centralized "electricity czar" instead. Two, actually, the Minister of Energy (who changes every year or two) and the Ont. Power Authority. The latter is regulated by the Ont. Energy Board, the former gets replaced periodically by the Premier, who in turn gets replaced periodically by the electorate. Unfortunately for public regulation, the Minister seems to get to make all the important decisions, and the OPA-plus-OEB only gets to decide what's left over.
Furthermore, governments in Canada (and the US) are really fond of throwing taxpayer money at nuclear reactors. The fact that the Canadian government owns a reactor vendor just makes it harder to get a coherent sentence out of them.
Another way to add sophistication to the comparison of wind and nukes would be to try to calculate their contribution to the grid's total reliability, e.g., the probability of power outages. We're still learning about the relationship between wind availability and electrical demand, and we're also early on the learning curve about large multi-reactor nuclear outages (because we've only had a few, but they've been lulus).
The bottom line is that EITHER an all-wind grid OR an all-nuclear grid would have third-world reliability, even if it were over-built to completely unaffordable levels. Both of these generators are "baseload". That doesn't mean reliable, and it doesn't even mean "24/7" -- at least not like your local all-night drug store. It means that they both need to be "kept in their place" in the grid, and supplemented with a lot of reliable and dispatchible capacity, if the lights are going to stay on. That's way cheaper than storing excess baseload power and re-using it (at 40-ish% turnaround efficiency) when the system needs it. Adding the actual cost of real energy storage to EITHER nukes or wind would make them even less affordable than they are now. That's not something that's peculiar to wind, because nuclear couldn't afford it, either. (85% reliability sounds good until you apply it to your electrical supply, then you realize it's third-world.)
Good start
This is a good starting point for an analysis. What could be an improvement is to talk about levelized costs; this takes into account the other factors that were not quantified.
Just a few examples, a nuclear system would require
- running costs (maintenance of the reactor plus fuel, this is bigger than for wind)
- auxiliary facilities for enrichment etc. Couple 100 per kW at least. (typically higher than wind's auxiliary facilities).
- transmission upgrades (typically smaller than wind because of nuclear plants' higher capacity factor making more efficient use of the infrastructure)
- decommissioning. Historically underrated (especially in britain) and it is rising
- reprocessing or sea water uranium mining (ore quality degradation leaves no other choice in the medium to long term; breeders don't work and/or are too expensive and this isn't likely to change sufficiently for at least another two decades).
- higher interest rates for nuclear because it's a less attractive business investment with typically more investment risks than wind projects.
- Grid managment (effective load carrying capacity, demand side managment etc. Lower for nuclear than for wind).
- proliferation and security costs. Often neglected because it is vague but should not be ignored for that reason.
All of these things add a bit to the cost per kWh, and combined it adds up to a lot.
Because wind also has some of such costs, levelizing this in a per kWh cost gives the single most complete (and therefore relevant) cost comparison between wind and nuclear.
It looks like, overall, new wind is cheaper right now than new nuclear, at least in the US, based on some recent projects. It's interesting to think what will happen in the future. If learning curves are any indication, wind's going to beat nuclear by a long run. But we'll see.
Hidden Costs
There is, of course, no discussion of health costs resulting from nuclear waste disposal. In Barnwell County cancer rates are higher than the norm fro the rest of the state. At the Barnwell nuclear dumping site radioactive waste is burried in shallow cement troughs exposed to rain from above and draining the rain through to the water table. One of the radioactive wastes has been leaking tritium, which in itself is not an apparent huge problem. Its half-life is approximately 20 years. Yet it is an indicator of the sieve-like system that will allow other radioactive elements to escape. The problem is that the tritium leak indicates serious leakage and no improved plans for storage. The tritium is on it's way to a creek which adults, children, animals frequent.
We have to include human cost because when it comes to nuclear power, it is high, whereas with wind power, it is negligible. To omit human cost is negligent and tragic.
Hats off, though, to a fine attempt to put the "bottom-line" figures into the conversations where usually only the utilities' figures are considered by states (esp South Carolina)
Missing assumptions?
The first thing that strikes me is, why are you comparing wind to nuclear? Nuclear is baseload--on all the time. Wind is intermittent. That's why Pickens wants natural gas plants to complement the wind farms; they can be turned on and off quickly as the supply/demand varies. Unless there's a huge storage system (batteries or flywheels?) to make wind-generated energy available at all times, it doesn't compete in the same market segment. And pricing the storage is not part of the picture, is it?
Second, I don't understand why you would not count the financing costs. If it's 50% for nuclear, and you could guess at 10-15% for wind (because of the time factor), at least that's a ball park--enough to see a big difference.
Third, while comparing capital costs is a start, you correctly point out that transmission lines are a big consideration that you haven't included, so the usefulness of the comparison is limited at best.
Fourth, capital costs are only a part of the picture. You mention waste disposal, which is an important and often-omitted cost, but nuclear also has vastly more costs in fuel, maintenance and management. These can be roughly quantified and added to the assessment--and explain why only a small fringe group of financial experts are touting nuclear.
Location, Location, Location
Location, Location, Location
I surprising unbiased analysis. Could there be a reason that FP&L, a leader in wind energy and nuclear power, is proposing wind projects in one place and nuclear in another? Why does AEP use coal in West Virgina?
Each project is considered on the merits of that project. Considering how fast the cost of coal and natural gas are increasing, there is a huge market for both nukes and wind. The real issue is that neither can be built fast enough. Location is important.
Plan, Plan, Plan
The nation needs an energy plan; a new paradigm for transportation; and a new concept and infrastructure for energy distribution, among other things. It just won't do anymore to leave it up to individual companies entirely to make decisions based solely on the merits of individual projects. They are part of a larger whole, and it is the unbridled pursuit of self-interest that has led to the greatest market failure in human history called global warming.
Location, location, location? Global warming is everywhere.
Hidden Costs
The cost of waste disposal was mentioned in the piece, and that could be a dealbreaker. It is not a capital cost, but it is a cost nevertheless -- though borne by ratepayers and taxpayers. Is not a trivial amount. Yucca Mountain's cost is now close to $100 billion, and that will store waste only from the existing nuclear footprint, if it ever gets built. We have already seen how the hidden cost of securing oil supplies has distorted the economics of energy use to the present day. We should not make the same mistake with nuclear energy. Let's make sure we know what we're getting into, soup to nuts.
You have forgotten that
You have forgotten that nuclear powerplants lasts longer than wind powerplants.
Plant longevity
I think most of our nuke plants were licensed for 40 years originally and according to the nuke website I referred to in the article, about half have been re-licensed for another 20 years. I gather that after re-licensing that the operator typically does some refurbishment. How much might that cost?
I don't know how long today's wind turbines are expected to last; I'd think 20-30 years on general principles, but maybe more. I think some of the turbines installed in the last energy crisis in the late 70's are still running. But even if the turbine is worn out, the tower and other infrastructure is still good. And how much money would it take to refurbish the turbine?
I think you're probably right, but I don't have enough information to produce numbers with any confidence, which is one reason this was an attempt at a simplified analysis of the capital costs.
It's a small effect
The effect of doubling the lifetime of the reactor is very small when it comes to levelized costs. This is because of the way capitalism values time-money relations. It's an asymptotic line, as a result the effect of increasing from 30 to 60 years may only be about 20-30 percent. The effect of going from 60 to 90 is almost zero.
Assumptions
I appreciate very much your efforts at tacking up some actual numbers. So much discussion related to cost is just handwaving.
Still, there are some parts that seem to be dangling. Principally, the analysis assumes that construction expertise for wind turbines will improve with resulting cost reductions, but the same thing won't happen for nuclear power plants. This assumption leads to the conclusion that wind farms will eventually be cheaper.
That goes against intuition. Wind turbines are pretty simple and it's hard to see how the costs can be reduced by a large amount. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, have a very large potential for reducing construction costs and, especially, construction times. In the article, the financing costs are estimated at less than 50% and again at 71%. It would be helpful to know the basis of these estimates. In Japan, plants are built in less than five years. If other countries were to embark on major construction programs they could do at least as well. It seems as though Sen. McCain's program would cause nuclear to be cheaper.
I think the objective of the article is to show that wind energy can supplant nuclear energy. That's not true, of course. Wind energy has the unsatisfactory feature of being unavailable much of the time. There are no practical ways of storing bulk energy to overcome that serious handicap but if there were they would drive costs out of sight. For more on bulk energy storage, please look here.
Assumptions explained
Red Craig,
Perhaps the financing numbers could have been clearer. When I didn't know the financing costs for the nuclear plant, I used the highest reasonable financing number to work backwards to get the actual plant cost. The highest number I've seen used with any frequency is 50%, meaning that final price was 50% financing, 50% actual construction. In that case, financing doubles the pre-finance costs. So, I cut the total price of the first plant by half. More likely, financing was less than 50% and the number I came up with understated the plant cost.
I got the 71% multiplier by averaging the financing costs for the three examples, but this isn't 71% of the total, it's 71% of the pre-finance cost. As a percent of total cost, financing ends up at 41%, which is in the ballpark of the 50% figure.
I think manufacturing efficiencies are more likely in a smaller item built on a production line than a nuke plant. Perhaps they'll figure a way to make nuke plant construction more efficient, but I think they work on that pretty hard to start with.
I looked at the bulk energy link; I think they cover the alternatives pretty well. I actually think energy storage is the biggest technical issue we have remaining before we can replace all of our coal, but their calculations assume that you have to store enough US electricity for 100 days. Not realistic. A week's or so worth would be enough and maybe not even that much. Of course, we can use a combination of the things they mention, so we don't need a cave 10,000 miles wide.
Thanks
As I read through the article again, I see the finance part was written clearly; I just read it quickly.
Maybe we're both uncertain about future cost trends. The plan for future nuclear construction is to stay on some small number of standardized designs, say five or six. As equipment fabricators and construction teams gain familiarity with the work, one has to suppose the work will speed up. Something like the difference between tract houses and custom architect-designed individual houses. In comparison, aren't wind turbines already factory-built? As many as have been installed, I'd suppose the learning curve is pretty flat.
The 100 days' storage is based on that being the length of time winds all over North America are low. There aren't any places that have excess wind energy to share, and the period isn't broken up into one-week segments; the winds stay low for the whole summer, not counting the occasional tornado. Wind energy doesn't stop during the summer, but there has to be some fifty days' energy stored up at the beginning. One could double or triple the number of wind turbines to compensate. That would reduce the amount of storage required but would also more than double or triple the cost, the extra cost being due to the law of diminishing returns (the best locations are exploited first).
The 10,000 mile cave is for only one day's storage. Compressed-air storage isn't going to be importantly useful. Pumped storage is just about all there is and there isn't much of that.
The way I see it is that to minimize the effects of climate change will require all the renewable energy we can manage, all the nuclear plants we can build, and more conservation than anyone wants.
Even if you would only have
Even if you would only have to store enough energy for one week the costs would still be many times higher than nuclear power
Not true
This is a very common myth. It just shows how little some people understand energy and grid load issues. Nuclear power also needs storage because it is baseload and demand is not. Resistance heaters can be used to dump the excess baseload but that roughly doubles the cost of nuclear power (mostly due to much reduced output). Load following by throttling the reactor or turbine has a similar or bigger impact on cost. Moreover, wind (but also nuclear) can use demand side storage such as end use thermal (hot or cold demands) storage. A small percentage of biogas burned in gas turbines deals with the occassional longer term storage. Alternatively, one might use CAES with biogas which are more efficient although slightly more costly.
None of that in Belgium
Hi,
As mentioned in this blog, Flanders (Belgium) doesn’t invest in wind mills at all. We’ve only 123 units. On top of that, as a private person, it’s rather impossible to install a private wind mill.
Belgium is still focused on nuclear energy and the main electricity provider doesn’t want these nuclear power plants to be closed as you may read in this blog.
Eddy
What's your point?
No offense, but things aren't going to well in Belgium right now. Politically, socially, and culturally divided, and the air quality could be better. Look at Denmark, with it's loads of wind power installed. Things are going quite well in Denmark.
Now, I'm not insinuating there's a connexion with wind power development. I do wonder what your point is, as it doesn't appear to illustrate an argument.
Oh Wait
You mean just to illustrate the situation. I'll take that back then. Sorry.
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