Beelbeebub

An electric one would be sensible! 😁

Even then there is nuance - some countries prioritise keeping business electricity down at the expense of hugher domestic bills (Germany apparently) others the opposite. Some coubtries pay for infrastructure upgrades out of general tax rather than lumoing them on electric bills. Likewise things like green levies etc are on gas or general taxation. My understanding is the 15-20 years ago the thinking was to lump the transition costs on eekcteicty because everyone has electric and electric was, at the time, very co2 intensive so reducing consumption by cost was a good thing. We now have to unwind some of that.

Exactly. Energy and housing costs are basically dead money. Every £1 extra you have to spend on those is £1 less you can spend on a new outfit, a meal out, a holiday, a new kitchen etc.

Yup and whilst there is a fairly steady supply of new entrants to the hospitality workforce the same is not true of generators....

Yes they are. They tend to get rolled together when someone anti renewables days "ah but it costs so much! We should drill the north Sea for energy security and to being down bills" That argument is countered by showing renewables aren't more expensive (which can go back and forth) and more importantly that drilling the north Sea cannot provide enrgy security or bring down bills. Yes but with alot of nuance. For example - our gas is actually towards the cheaper end of comparable nations but our electricity and in particular our business elec is more expensive. This is a combination of multiple policy decisions. Even the much discussed marginal price auction system is not quite so cut a dried as appears. Interestingly gas *used* to be the price setter over 90% of the time. That has fallen to 2/3 the time now and is projected to keep falling. As to wen we can benefit - we already are as renewables have bkunted the impact of the recent gas price rise, but more generally by around 2030 the effect of transmission capacity increaces, older subsidy schemes ending etc are expected to start to bite. Two podcasts with energy policy professionals (climate change committee and OFGEM) are quite illuminating https://youtu.be/mFMPSms6MS4 https://youtu.be/NXjwkvaWclk

Even of the calculations were a fsctornof 10x out for wind turbines they would still be way better than gas plants. But the eco credentials of wind/solar are somewhat moot for this thread (though important of course). The argument this thread started with was that the "Net zero policies" like increacing renewable generation and electrifying heating and transport were worth doing from an economic and energy security perspective as they reduced the impact of world gas and oil prices on our economy. Subsequent events seem to be bearing this out. I listened to a podcast where the head of OFCOM was saying the impact of rising gas prices on electricity prices is less now than in 2022 because of the extra renewables. Electricity still rises but not as much.

They aren't turning because there is no capacity to transport the power they were contracted to (and are able to) produce. If I hire a bunch of workmen for a job but they can't do anything because the materials I ordered didn't arrive they still hat paid (at least if I want to keep my teeth). They turned up, ready to work and it's my fault they can't actually build anything. So yes, they are getting paid for sitting around but if I started sending labourers and trades home without pay because *I* effed up, i"d quickly find nobody would want to work for me. Again, the curtailment issue isn't unique to wind and the bulk of the cost is actually going to gas generators for turning up production.

Ha! 😁 No but I did have to "bunny suit up" amd wear a dosimeter for working on the lab and go through a radiation scanner on the way out each shift. Was an interesting job.

If you were contracted to produce cakes for wedding, you produced them and the customers courier couldn't make the lick uk because their vans were all busy - would you want to be paid? I suspect yes. The curtailment payments are due to the grid not being able to transport the contracted for power - which is a separate issue that is being addressed - and happens to gas (and once upon a time coal) plants as well This is false. The meme was popularised by the series "landman" where billybob Thornton goes on a (wrong) rant about wind turbines. The carbon payback for wind turbines varies from 6-18months. The bases vary depending on ground conditions but typically 100m3 per MW - so between 100-600m3 per turbine. But concrete is not unique to wind turbines. Hinckley C has over 40,000m3 in just one of the two reactor foundations. The turbine blade problem is real but more a function of composites not yet generally being recycled. This is changing but the current best practice it to recycle the blades by grinding them into particles and (you'll like this) using them in concrete..... 😁

This is part of thr high running costs. Nobody can design such a critical bit of equipment not to fail ever. What we can do is have an inspection and testing regime to catch any failure before it is catastrophic. So when they design a weld or a pipe or a valve, it's limits for fatigue, temp cycling, corrosion, embrittlemnt etc are all calculated and an inspection regime is decided. Then the item is inspected to make sure it is to spec, then it"s inspected using all sorts of expensive stuff and the results fed back into the simulations to check it's "on track" and adjustments to inspection regime made on light of the actual performance. It's a huge undertaking

You don't want to know how little planning for decommissioning was done for the early reactors (magnox, agr etc). Lots of stuff inaccessible, an unbelievable amount of stuff undocumented or not to the plans! We did design work for robotic decommissioning - really expensive special purpose robots and manipulator ms to go in and undo a nut or grind off a weld. The sort of thing a man with a spanner or grinder could do in an hour - which I think was the orginal plan when they designed some of these in the late 50's and 60's!

Absolutely, I played a small part in the magnox life extensions (Wylfa in particular) I'm sure the reactors will be kept running well beyond 2060 - which only compounds the uncertainty that EDF or it's successor will be around to honour it's commitment to decommissioning. There is a huge list of giant engineering companies that were around 50 years ago and aren't now.

Entirely consistent with the whole purpose of this thread. That we need "Net zero" policies to ensure our energy security. This thread started over a month before the Iran war. At the time gas prices were predicted to fall as more Lng capacity from the gulf and at European Lng terminals came on stream. My point was that if we abandoned NZ policies for a fossil fuel past/future (as some advocated) it would be bad for the UK in terms of energy security/prices - that we would be subject to fluctuations in the gas price that we had zero control over. I think, even you, would agree that I have been proven correct in the assertion that the uk is too exposed to fossil fuel price fluctiaons. Here's a thought experiment. The price of coal has jumped from just over 100USD to just over 130USD? Have you heard anyone in the UK panicking about the price of coal? Are we worried about it's impact on our economy? Are our electricity prices rising because of the price of coal? Nope - because coal is such a tiny part of our energy mix. We should aim to do the same with oil and gas.

The design life of hinckley C is about 30 years or to the 2060's That's a fair old time. We've seen countries dissappear and appear. Alliances crumble and old friends become enimies and vice versa. We've seen giant companies who ruled the commercial sphere vanish to be replaced with companies in sectors that didn't exist. We have no firm idea of what the landscape will be by the late 20XXs, all sorts of things could happen. French revolution, UK breakup, Cold war between Eurasian Alliance and the Anglo-American commonwealth who knows. What we do know is there will be a nuclear reactor that needs an expensive decommissioning process sat in what is currently the UK and that history has shown that companies, when faced with expensive clean up costs after the money making bonanza is over, quite often shuffle away from their responsibilities.

Ultimately the tax payer is the decomissioner of last resort though. You can write all the contracts you want but if EDF go bust what are we going to do? A fair enough point. I would be good to see the cost of backup included, though it is surely just the cost of running on gas/imports. Which does mean we definitely need to also include the cost (climate change impacts) of carbon emissions for fossil fuel plants. That means (at a minimum) the carbon costs that are already factored in