The Cost Of Generating Electricity

If you want to read a dry document look no further than the "The Cost of Generating Electricity" from the Royal Academy of Engineering. But to describe this document as dry is very far from an insult. It does exactly what it says on the tin (or header page). It makes no blatent partisan statements. It is a terse brutally scientific appraisal of the costs of generating electricity by different methods of generation.

It includes as optional extras the bits that some wish to miss out.

take this graph:

There are also two caveats attached to the graph. These are:

[quote]

1 With the exception of nuclear, the analysis assumes that decommissioning is cost neutral. The capital cost estimate for nuclear plant includes an allowance for the costs of decommissioning.
2 For the purpose of this study, wave and marine technologies are deemed to be predictable and therefore have not been burdened with the additional cost of standby generation.

[unquote]

So Nuclear including decommisioning costs less per MW than any other generation method other than CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) and is less than one third of the cost of offshore wind generation and well under half the cost of on shore wind generation. Even if you exclude the extra spinning reserve needed by wind, nuclear is still massively cheaper.

But pure cost is not the only issue. One item constantly raised by pro-windies is energy security, so lets have a look at a graph concerning a price variation of +/- 20% on each energy fuel.

So because nuclear uses so little fuel, the cost of the fuel is not far off immaterial. Also all nuclear fuel can either be created from existing stocks (85 years worth) and at worst purchased from the massive ore supplies in secure countries like Australia. With nuclear there is no risk to fuel supply.

The final argument bleated out by proponents of wind concerns CO2 emissions. Look at this:

Clearly the cheapest and least polluting technology is Nuclear. In fact just about everything , even with carbon mitigation is more cost effective than wind.

So why are we continuing to ruin our countryside with these monstrous, ineffective and massively expensive wind turbines?

All answers please to Billothewisp, written on a clean £50.00 note.Please mark all bank notes "ROC subsidy"

The Wind Turbine in Reading

The Daily Mail was in typical indignant mode when it reported (HERE) "Is this the most useless wind turbine?" But I think their report could had been a little more thorough.

With a quick look through the Renewable Energy Foundation database on wind turbine output (HERE) it quickly becomes evident that while the output from the Reading turbine is derisory, it is far from being the worst performing turbine. At least the Daily Mail pointed out that this  thing gets a ROC subsidy of £130,000 while producing only £100,000 worth electricity. (total payout £230,000). But the rest of the figures they present, shocking as they are, disguise the truly terrible statistics surrounding the whole of the wind power industry.

I suppose these up front figures look so bad the Daily Mail has simply not dug any deeper. If they did ( and it is not difficult) they would find that the actual situation is far, far worse.

The main area of the Mail's indignation is that for this particular turbine at Green Park in Reading, the Capacity Factor for 2010 was only 15%. But accepting this figure on face value neglects the true awfulness of the situation. If they had paid attention the the nature of wind power they would have found that this turbine would have failed to even get close to this pathetic output MOST of the time.

The day to day figures for this individual turbine, like most others, are hard to come by. But we know from the NETA data  (HERE) that nationally half the energy from wind is generated in less than 25% of the time (See earlier Post Here). This leaves the other half to cover 75%  of the time. From figures from the Le Ranch Wind farm in the USA we see that, on a single site basis this gets further scewed to 15% and 85%  (Lee Ranch synopsis half way down this Wikipedia page)

Even if you use the UK national figures this means that the typical  (i.e. the most common output)  from this turbine  falls to 10%.If you use the (probably more applicable) Le Ranch figures this typical output falls to less than 9%.

But even that fails to show how 40% the electricity will arrive when it is unneeded (i.e. at night) and that the output will be at this dismal 9% (or less) for one third of the time. But however lowly the output, or unneeded it may be, the electricity generated  is guaranteed a full market price plus the massive ROC subsidy.

High wind, or low wind, night or day, the Fat Cats in the wind industry are always smiling. Forget about bankers bonuses. Look at the money (your money) these people are raking in.

Every pound coin that people spend on electricity has its own little carbon footprint. Money has to be earned. In earning money resources are used. Using this hard earned cash to fund massively expensive and hopelessly inefficient wind generated electricity is not only foolish and wasteful but is also counter productive.

Wind Turbines: National 3 Months Data

See last post... Here is the raw 3 month NETA data and a tidied version in xls and ods formats

Files Are Here

The four files are attachment on the bottom of the home page.

The first two are the two complete zip files from NETA for the last 3 months power generation output. Downloaded by me tonight.

The other two are cleaned up versions of the CSV file saved in ods and xls formats.

No data has been deleted in the cleaned up xls and ods files, but I have added a header showing which column is which. The only caveat here is that both the Irish interconnector and the "other" generation methods were all zeros so I dont know which is which. But as they are all zero it doesn't really matter.

Love & Kisses
Billothewisp

Wind Power: Three Months Data

I am following a very interesting thread on the IET (formerly IEE) website regarding  the sheer uselessness of windpower during the cold snap we have just had.  (See Here)  It makes interesting reading.

While I have been following the excellent Neta Website myself for a few weeks, I did not realise that they actually provide  a full 3 month data set  for all the various methods of power generation. This displays actual outputs on a half hourly basis. (Thanks to "Ipayyoursalary" on the IET thread for pointing this out)

I have one minor criticism of this data. While the XML data set looks good, the potentially more immediately useable CSV data lacks headers and you have to go digging through the XML equivalent to figure out what is what.

But even so, this is an absolute gold mine. Or, if you are a greedy wind farm developer, possibly a nest of vipers.

Congratulations must be given to those who run the Neta site, not only for producing this data set, but also for coherently displaying the fluctuations and methodology of the country's power generation.

I downloaded the CSV and XML data sets tonight and have had a first hack at simply tidying up the CSV file so people can use it in Excel or Calc. I'll be having a crack at some analysis myself in the next few days but I know some of the folk who read this blog can do things with a spreadsheet that would make my ears bleed.

I will try and figure out a way of getting this file available for general download and will raise another post when I have sussed it out.

Love & Kisses
Billothewisp