In the UK it has almost become an accepted truth in the media that new nuclear power is needed because there is no other practical or cheaper way to balance fluctuating wind and solar power.
A simple way to see it is that you can't provide temporary supply with a plant that's meant to be running all the time... It will already be running (or be unable to run for unrelated technical reasons)
Electricity to consumers in the UK are inordinately high in part because the highest marginal cost wholesale pricing mechanism is dominated by gas. Taking gas pricing into a new “out-of-market” mechanism would serve two vital purposes. First it could and should anticipate paying for the use of gas to provide capacity and not MWs. Second it would immediately cause the price of electricity to better reflect the cost of renewables, reducing electricity prices to domestic and business users alike. This would make not just economic sense, but political sense by demonstrating that decarbonising the electricity supply is a benefit today, not just jam tomorrow.
Thank you for the rational approach to maximising emissions reduction in the most economical way possible.
Step 1 should be get to 100 percent renewables 95 percent of the time with, as you note, open cycle gas filling in during the occasional dunkelflaute.
Meanwhile, as you also note, you pursue various forms of step 2: electrifying everything possible and making all our infrastructure as efficient as possible.
Finally, and also simultaneously, you pursue step 3: building long-term storage (such as closed-loop pumped hydro) and step 4: continuing to research and develop new and alternative generation and storage technologies.
The vast sums saved by abandoning nuclear would buy a lot of steps 2, 3 and 4!
I accept all of the arguments, but as a non-specialist I do also watch what decisions are being made else where. In China, which is arguably the most climate aware country in the world, they are putting a lot of investment into nuclear, mostly standard U fission, but also SMRs and Th-fuelled MSRs. For a multitude of reasons they are able to drive down the cost and build-times of conventional nuclear whilst their research programs deliver on a time scale that the US and Europe struggle to match. The significant thing is they drive their nuclear program forward in parallel with wind and solar, rather than as alternatives.
The Copper-Crunch is now ongoing. When price ‘rationing’ bites, technologies that use copper inefficiently will perish through coming decades, maybe even beyond the 2050s.
That includes copper-guzzling wind and solar pv that use 20X more copper per TWh generated than Gen III+, super-safe nuclear power plants (NPPs), along with EVs/EV charging and BESSs.
I might just see the birth of the new era, but you're 14 years younger than me and you should witness the roaring 30s and 40s exponential build out of Gen III+ NPPs
Gen III+ NPPs for base load electricity
Gen III+ NPPs combined with SOEC electrolysers for diurnal and seasonal load following. This combination can load follow faster than a gas peaker by switching between grid supply and the manufacture of greener-than-green, nuclear enabled hydrogen (NEH)
Gen III+ NPPs dedicated to the production of NEH to decarbonise all other sectors of energy use that cannot be directly electrified
Gen III+ NPPs and NEH does it all. It's so simple; it's the Occam's Razor solution to completely eliminating the 'evils' of burning fossil fuels. It's minimal in every aspect of environmental impact including a minimal requirement for energy storage, even conventional and pumped hydro.
It makes the Rube Goldberg technologically-multitudinous 'renewables solution’ seem laughable.
A key issue is the terms of business agreed with the gas capacity providers. Your analysis references build costs for gas facilities but consumers will not see those benefits if the right arrangements are not in place to secure the benefits. Operators of gas plants have been able, in effect, to hold the grid and consumers to ransom and extract extraordinarily high prices for plugging short term supply gaps. Now everyone will recognise that if fixed costs need to be recovered off a smaller number of operating hours the unit price is going to be higher than if they are baseload providers, but that does not mean no regulation of pricing. A better backup market arrangement will be required.
The role of the new nuclear is NOT to pick up the slack when wind + solar aren't generating, it's to provide a large baseload, so that it won't be necessary to build so much wind + solar + batteries. Nuclear can provide 50-80% of minimum load, wind + solar + batteries pick up the rest, gas fills in any remaining gaps. Nuclear is needed because without it you need to cover gigantic amounts of land with panels / windmills. Why do that, when nuclear is more reliable and safer?
Also regarding costs, Sizewell C is an abomination, the costs of which have ballooned disproportionately. But this is a UK thing not a nuclear thing. South Korea are building nuclear at a tenth of the cost. In the UK, any big government or capital project has gigantic cost overruns, pointing to systemic UK issues in permitting and procurement. Those issues need to be solved anyway.
The problems with nuclear power are partly a problem with construction in general, and not to be waived away by a comparison with South Korea. This is inaccurate anyway relying on a 'factoid' which does the rounds. South Korea is catching up with the west in having increasing construction tomes for nuclear power. The latest power plant to come on line took 11 years from construction start to generation anyway. See https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/shin-hanul-2. See my comments on how nuclear power has become so expensive here: 'Why nuclear power plant are so expensive, especially in the West' https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/why-nuclear-power-plant-are-so-expensive
Surely the cheapest and easiest way is to manage demand? Discretionary demand (most of it) is met when power is available. Nuclear power might not be v. good at filling gaps, but it is essential nonetheless.
Great blog. I was not aware that CCGTs are less flexible than OCGTs. Is that universally true? Here in Austria, as well as a few other countries I have been following, I also note that gas production springs in for short spurts when the sun goes down and not enough wind is available, BUT, I also note that in those periods of course the spot price shoots up (obviously making the gas-produced electricity profitable), and that in turn motivates the production of electricity from gas plants EVEN if a countries needs are being more than met - i.e. export is also being promoted. I guess one could argue that if a neighbor needs the electricity than so be it, but I simply wonder about the climate-related efficacy. Its one thing to argue we need the gas-turbines to spring in when there are not enough renewables available, but its another to note the overriding economic factor - as long as the spot price shoots up, gas-turbines will be used.
CCGTs can respond reasonably quickly but their conversion efficiency goes down by a lot when stopping and starting. This makes them less effective than OGCTs which are cheaper
I attended an online event yesterday at which East Midlands Nuclear set out their proposals for nuclear power generation in the region. I posed the following question, which (not surprisingly) due to shortage of time did not receive an answer...
"Nuclear power has, up to now, been regarded as providing reliable power for base load. This has suited the characteristics of reactors and the capital dominated economics of nuclear power that demands a high and maintained load factor. In an age where variable renewables are taking the lion's share of generation, how will nuclear play a compatible part in balancing the grid? If stored hydrogen and gas turbines form a significant part of the answer, the economics will be highly questionable."
The following was a supplementary question, that also went unanswered...
"The East Midlands, or more specifically the EMCCA/D2N2 Area is trailing behind the UK in its rate of decarbonisation [35.5% reduction in GHGs from 2005 to 2023 according to the ONS, compared to the UK's 45.8%]. Can the East Midlands afford to have an energy strategy in which principal elements come on stream so far into the future and/or are very speculative?"
Thanks David for another excellent factual article exploding the myth that we need nuclear to "keep the lights on". Here at STAND (Severnside Together Against Nuclear Development), where we have been fighting nuclear power since the 80's, we are facing the prospect of 3 Rolls Royce "small" ha ha "modular" ha ha reactors on the old Oldbury site. We quote you often on our website and you are a great source of information.
We are having a public meeting on 17th October in Lydney where Jonathon Porritt will be one of the main speakers. We'd love to have you too! (only 8hrs 20 mins by car according to RAC route planner!). Keep up the good (essential) work!
I would just add - if and when BECCS (for example Drax, running two biomass units at a total of roughly 1.2 GW) comes on-line, the intention is to maximise 'negative emissions', and that requires that they generate with a high load factor. The resultant additional 'firm' power on the grid on top of nuclear would curtail even more weather dependent renewables. Go out to 2050 when it's suggested BECCS might be storing as much as 80million tonnes of CO2 per year and we'd need as much as 10GW of BECCS generating capacity, running baseload. What role for nuclear then?
A model looking at a hypothetical 10 GW UK wind fleet (which is a significant portion of current capacity) found that:
* Power is below 20% of available power for 3,448 hours (20 weeks) in a year.
* Power is below 10% of available power for 1,519 hours (9 weeks) in a year.
* Of the hours below 10% of maximum, 1,178 hours (78%) occur in events that continue for 6 hours or more.
These figures from the model suggest that wind output can be very low for a substantial portion of the year, and these low-output periods can be prolonged.
Of course there would be many other times where it is well below 100%. The gas percentage in your scenario would be more like 30%.
If you look at the grid power sources every half hour for the current year you will see the trend. I cannot attach the document as there is a copyright stamp.
So the “Holy Grail” of load following nuclear is actually a really bad idea!
I’m more and more convinced that if nuclear is to exist anywhere it’s the heat output that should determine location and operation, and the electricity is just a by product to be got rid of
But the conventional nuclear plants that we are building produce relatively low temperature outputs, as they are geared to water cooling. SMRs could be useful for some process heat but those planned at present will still be in the 300C range. MSRs can produce 700C, which makes them suitable for a wider range of processes. However, I have heard on no proposals for using them in the UK.
High temperature reactors have been tried before, and not been successful. Really SMRs are trying to reinvent the past as the future. There's a reason why SMRs aren't new or problem-solving. See my post 'Why small modular reactors do not exist - history gives the answer' https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/why-small-modular-reactors-do-not
What temperature would you need for district heating though? If we are going to go to the enormous expense of building nuclear, we should at least try to use more than 1/3 of the energy, especially as we are planning major house building at the same time. Every new district could have its own SMR
Given that there will never be much nuclear, and Scotland, Wales and northern England all have “excess” renewables, the SMRs should go where most of the new housing will go, in SE England. It’s a perfect pairing
oh dear! It’s a shame that people advocate non-existent SMRs rather than large scale heat pumps to power district heating networks. The former are impractical for a number of reasons - the latter far more practical and many times cheaper and more effective for sure
I don’t advocate them, but if we are going to build them, and the government has said we are, we should at least get the most out of the expenditure
The other option is to let them build SMRs on the old nuclear sites, none of which have any use for the electricity or heat, and them spend even more upgrading the grid to get the electricity to SE England
I have done a blog post about the 'primary energy fallacy' - you don't have to replace hydrocarbons with an equal amount of renewables. See 'How small increases in renewables produce big cuts in carbon emissions' https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/how-small-increases-in-renewables As for battery materials, you are using a straw man when you say that lithium batteries are not good to use for long term storage. We don't argue that. Batteries are becoming more and more economic for short term storage. In addition to that grid forming inverters can and are being efficiently used. See for example 'Grid-Scale Battery Stabilizes Scottish Power Supply Its advanced inverters quickly inject power and current' https://spectrum.ieee.org/grid-scale-battery-scotland
A simple way to see it is that you can't provide temporary supply with a plant that's meant to be running all the time... It will already be running (or be unable to run for unrelated technical reasons)
Electricity to consumers in the UK are inordinately high in part because the highest marginal cost wholesale pricing mechanism is dominated by gas. Taking gas pricing into a new “out-of-market” mechanism would serve two vital purposes. First it could and should anticipate paying for the use of gas to provide capacity and not MWs. Second it would immediately cause the price of electricity to better reflect the cost of renewables, reducing electricity prices to domestic and business users alike. This would make not just economic sense, but political sense by demonstrating that decarbonising the electricity supply is a benefit today, not just jam tomorrow.
Great idea in principle. The devil is in the detail, as they say.
Thank you for the rational approach to maximising emissions reduction in the most economical way possible.
Step 1 should be get to 100 percent renewables 95 percent of the time with, as you note, open cycle gas filling in during the occasional dunkelflaute.
Meanwhile, as you also note, you pursue various forms of step 2: electrifying everything possible and making all our infrastructure as efficient as possible.
Finally, and also simultaneously, you pursue step 3: building long-term storage (such as closed-loop pumped hydro) and step 4: continuing to research and develop new and alternative generation and storage technologies.
The vast sums saved by abandoning nuclear would buy a lot of steps 2, 3 and 4!
A bad way? A virtually impossible way, surely?
I accept all of the arguments, but as a non-specialist I do also watch what decisions are being made else where. In China, which is arguably the most climate aware country in the world, they are putting a lot of investment into nuclear, mostly standard U fission, but also SMRs and Th-fuelled MSRs. For a multitude of reasons they are able to drive down the cost and build-times of conventional nuclear whilst their research programs deliver on a time scale that the US and Europe struggle to match. The significant thing is they drive their nuclear program forward in parallel with wind and solar, rather than as alternatives.
The Copper-Crunch is now ongoing. When price ‘rationing’ bites, technologies that use copper inefficiently will perish through coming decades, maybe even beyond the 2050s.
That includes copper-guzzling wind and solar pv that use 20X more copper per TWh generated than Gen III+, super-safe nuclear power plants (NPPs), along with EVs/EV charging and BESSs.
I might just see the birth of the new era, but you're 14 years younger than me and you should witness the roaring 30s and 40s exponential build out of Gen III+ NPPs
Gen III+ NPPs for base load electricity
Gen III+ NPPs combined with SOEC electrolysers for diurnal and seasonal load following. This combination can load follow faster than a gas peaker by switching between grid supply and the manufacture of greener-than-green, nuclear enabled hydrogen (NEH)
Gen III+ NPPs dedicated to the production of NEH to decarbonise all other sectors of energy use that cannot be directly electrified
Gen III+ NPPs and NEH does it all. It's so simple; it's the Occam's Razor solution to completely eliminating the 'evils' of burning fossil fuels. It's minimal in every aspect of environmental impact including a minimal requirement for energy storage, even conventional and pumped hydro.
It makes the Rube Goldberg technologically-multitudinous 'renewables solution’ seem laughable.
https://substack.com/@colinmegson/p-136639877
A key issue is the terms of business agreed with the gas capacity providers. Your analysis references build costs for gas facilities but consumers will not see those benefits if the right arrangements are not in place to secure the benefits. Operators of gas plants have been able, in effect, to hold the grid and consumers to ransom and extract extraordinarily high prices for plugging short term supply gaps. Now everyone will recognise that if fixed costs need to be recovered off a smaller number of operating hours the unit price is going to be higher than if they are baseload providers, but that does not mean no regulation of pricing. A better backup market arrangement will be required.
a much larger capacity of batteries will provide a lot more competition with the gas generators than exists at present
The role of the new nuclear is NOT to pick up the slack when wind + solar aren't generating, it's to provide a large baseload, so that it won't be necessary to build so much wind + solar + batteries. Nuclear can provide 50-80% of minimum load, wind + solar + batteries pick up the rest, gas fills in any remaining gaps. Nuclear is needed because without it you need to cover gigantic amounts of land with panels / windmills. Why do that, when nuclear is more reliable and safer?
Also regarding costs, Sizewell C is an abomination, the costs of which have ballooned disproportionately. But this is a UK thing not a nuclear thing. South Korea are building nuclear at a tenth of the cost. In the UK, any big government or capital project has gigantic cost overruns, pointing to systemic UK issues in permitting and procurement. Those issues need to be solved anyway.
The problems with nuclear power are partly a problem with construction in general, and not to be waived away by a comparison with South Korea. This is inaccurate anyway relying on a 'factoid' which does the rounds. South Korea is catching up with the west in having increasing construction tomes for nuclear power. The latest power plant to come on line took 11 years from construction start to generation anyway. See https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/shin-hanul-2. See my comments on how nuclear power has become so expensive here: 'Why nuclear power plant are so expensive, especially in the West' https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/why-nuclear-power-plant-are-so-expensive
Surely the cheapest and easiest way is to manage demand? Discretionary demand (most of it) is met when power is available. Nuclear power might not be v. good at filling gaps, but it is essential nonetheless.
demand side managment or ‘flexibility’ is important in the case of any supply-side mixture
Great blog. I was not aware that CCGTs are less flexible than OCGTs. Is that universally true? Here in Austria, as well as a few other countries I have been following, I also note that gas production springs in for short spurts when the sun goes down and not enough wind is available, BUT, I also note that in those periods of course the spot price shoots up (obviously making the gas-produced electricity profitable), and that in turn motivates the production of electricity from gas plants EVEN if a countries needs are being more than met - i.e. export is also being promoted. I guess one could argue that if a neighbor needs the electricity than so be it, but I simply wonder about the climate-related efficacy. Its one thing to argue we need the gas-turbines to spring in when there are not enough renewables available, but its another to note the overriding economic factor - as long as the spot price shoots up, gas-turbines will be used.
CCGTs can respond reasonably quickly but their conversion efficiency goes down by a lot when stopping and starting. This makes them less effective than OGCTs which are cheaper
I absolutely agree with you on this, David.
I attended an online event yesterday at which East Midlands Nuclear set out their proposals for nuclear power generation in the region. I posed the following question, which (not surprisingly) due to shortage of time did not receive an answer...
"Nuclear power has, up to now, been regarded as providing reliable power for base load. This has suited the characteristics of reactors and the capital dominated economics of nuclear power that demands a high and maintained load factor. In an age where variable renewables are taking the lion's share of generation, how will nuclear play a compatible part in balancing the grid? If stored hydrogen and gas turbines form a significant part of the answer, the economics will be highly questionable."
The following was a supplementary question, that also went unanswered...
"The East Midlands, or more specifically the EMCCA/D2N2 Area is trailing behind the UK in its rate of decarbonisation [35.5% reduction in GHGs from 2005 to 2023 according to the ONS, compared to the UK's 45.8%]. Can the East Midlands afford to have an energy strategy in which principal elements come on stream so far into the future and/or are very speculative?"
Thanks David for another excellent factual article exploding the myth that we need nuclear to "keep the lights on". Here at STAND (Severnside Together Against Nuclear Development), where we have been fighting nuclear power since the 80's, we are facing the prospect of 3 Rolls Royce "small" ha ha "modular" ha ha reactors on the old Oldbury site. We quote you often on our website and you are a great source of information.
We are having a public meeting on 17th October in Lydney where Jonathon Porritt will be one of the main speakers. We'd love to have you too! (only 8hrs 20 mins by car according to RAC route planner!). Keep up the good (essential) work!
Agree with your arguments here David.
I would just add - if and when BECCS (for example Drax, running two biomass units at a total of roughly 1.2 GW) comes on-line, the intention is to maximise 'negative emissions', and that requires that they generate with a high load factor. The resultant additional 'firm' power on the grid on top of nuclear would curtail even more weather dependent renewables. Go out to 2050 when it's suggested BECCS might be storing as much as 80million tonnes of CO2 per year and we'd need as much as 10GW of BECCS generating capacity, running baseload. What role for nuclear then?
That is a huge amount of gas.
Modelled Data:
A model looking at a hypothetical 10 GW UK wind fleet (which is a significant portion of current capacity) found that:
* Power is below 20% of available power for 3,448 hours (20 weeks) in a year.
* Power is below 10% of available power for 1,519 hours (9 weeks) in a year.
* Of the hours below 10% of maximum, 1,178 hours (78%) occur in events that continue for 6 hours or more.
These figures from the model suggest that wind output can be very low for a substantial portion of the year, and these low-output periods can be prolonged.
Of course there would be many other times where it is well below 100%. The gas percentage in your scenario would be more like 30%.
Well you’ll have argue with the Committee on Climate Change whose analysis implies that they’ll be about 5% gas residual. That’s what my post says.
If you look at the grid power sources every half hour for the current year you will see the trend. I cannot attach the document as there is a copyright stamp.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisbond/p/hows-it-going-ed?r=kv235&utm_medium=ios
Doesn’t making nuclear load follow increase cost as maintenance increases and plant life reduces?
Yes
So the “Holy Grail” of load following nuclear is actually a really bad idea!
I’m more and more convinced that if nuclear is to exist anywhere it’s the heat output that should determine location and operation, and the electricity is just a by product to be got rid of
But the conventional nuclear plants that we are building produce relatively low temperature outputs, as they are geared to water cooling. SMRs could be useful for some process heat but those planned at present will still be in the 300C range. MSRs can produce 700C, which makes them suitable for a wider range of processes. However, I have heard on no proposals for using them in the UK.
High temperature reactors have been tried before, and not been successful. Really SMRs are trying to reinvent the past as the future. There's a reason why SMRs aren't new or problem-solving. See my post 'Why small modular reactors do not exist - history gives the answer' https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/why-small-modular-reactors-do-not
What temperature would you need for district heating though? If we are going to go to the enormous expense of building nuclear, we should at least try to use more than 1/3 of the energy, especially as we are planning major house building at the same time. Every new district could have its own SMR
Given that there will never be much nuclear, and Scotland, Wales and northern England all have “excess” renewables, the SMRs should go where most of the new housing will go, in SE England. It’s a perfect pairing
oh dear! It’s a shame that people advocate non-existent SMRs rather than large scale heat pumps to power district heating networks. The former are impractical for a number of reasons - the latter far more practical and many times cheaper and more effective for sure
I don’t advocate them, but if we are going to build them, and the government has said we are, we should at least get the most out of the expenditure
The other option is to let them build SMRs on the old nuclear sites, none of which have any use for the electricity or heat, and them spend even more upgrading the grid to get the electricity to SE England
multiple SMRs? doubt this very very much. They are a marketing illusion really. See my commentary specifically on this at https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/why-small-modular-reactors-do-not
I have done a blog post about the 'primary energy fallacy' - you don't have to replace hydrocarbons with an equal amount of renewables. See 'How small increases in renewables produce big cuts in carbon emissions' https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/how-small-increases-in-renewables As for battery materials, you are using a straw man when you say that lithium batteries are not good to use for long term storage. We don't argue that. Batteries are becoming more and more economic for short term storage. In addition to that grid forming inverters can and are being efficiently used. See for example 'Grid-Scale Battery Stabilizes Scottish Power Supply Its advanced inverters quickly inject power and current' https://spectrum.ieee.org/grid-scale-battery-scotland