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Zero-emission vehicles, their batteries & subsidies/rebates for them.- No politics regarding the subsidies!

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Offshore wind used to be considered rather expensive. Not any more.

In the latest UK auction, the government secured 11 GW of renewable energy capacity (7 GW from offshore wind) at a price of £48/MWh. That's 1/4 the current cost of gas-powered plants (£196/MWh). Once these new projects come online (in 2026/27), they will supply the equivalent of 13% of the UK's current electricity demand.
 
Offshore wind used to be considered rather expensive. Not any more.

In the latest UK auction, the government secured 11 GW of renewable energy capacity (7 GW from offshore wind) at a price of £48/MWh. That's 1/4 the current cost of gas-powered plants (£196/MWh). Once these new projects come online (in 2026/27), they will supply the equivalent of 13% of the UK's current electricity demand.
Doesn’t tell a true story every Wind Farm has a guaranteed price known as the Strike Price. The average subsidy has increased year on year and is averaging around £110 per MW hour and in one case has reached £390 per MW hour. The last available information on the average power output of Wind Farms in the UK is between 11% to 14% of their maximum rated output.
 
Doesn’t tell a true story every Wind Farm has a guaranteed price known as the Strike Price.

If I understood correctly, the strike price* is £48/MWh.
The average subsidy has increased year on year and is averaging around £110 per MW hour and in one case has reached £390 per MW hour.

Again, my understanding is that if the market price of electricity is less than the strike price, then the operator receives a subsidy (i.e., they get paid the strike price, rather than the market price).

If the market price is greater than the strike price, then the operator "loses" (i.e., they still have to sell their output at the agreed strike price).

Did I misunderstand?

The last available information on the average power output of Wind Farms in the UK is between 11% to 14% of their maximum rated output.

I don't know where the 42 TWhr/year of generated electricity, stated in the article, comes from, but that's 44% of rated output.

* The strike price is inflation-adjusted. The £48/MWh is the price in 2022 pounds.
 
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Amen. The Tesla SUV looks like a pregnant Prius.
I don't think it looks that good.

However, I remember the 1st Honda I purchased. I thought it was an ugly car. However, in every other way it was a terrific car. Plus you don't see it when driving. So while I of course prefer a good looking machine, if it is a good machine, bad looks don't deter me too much.
 
Doesn’t tell a true story every Wind Farm has a guaranteed price known as the Strike Price. The average subsidy has increased year on year and is averaging around £110 per MW hour and in one case has reached £390 per MW hour. The last available information on the average power output of Wind Farms in the UK is between 11% to 14% of their maximum rated output.
The rule of thumb used for US wind and solar is 30% of maximum output. In Texas during optimum conditions for wind and moderate demand wind producers are able to pay utilities to take their output because the subsidies are so high. There's no point in arguing with that character. I gave up a few days ago.
 
Subsidies to oil and gas producers dwarf those for wind and solar.

Texas Monthly had a very detailed article in which they looked at subsidies to different energy sectors in Texas. Lots of details there, but the general picture is captured in this graph

Energy-Subsidies-Oil-Gas-Renewables-Solar-Wind-Chart-3.jpg

Texas has been happy to offer financial support—in the form of both tax breaks and spending on infrastructure such as power lines—to fossil-fuel and renewables players. This chart tracks the totality of the state government’s subsidies in the past decade. Oil and gas remains king. Source: The University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute
 
@samsa nuclear is looking reallly good. Other than the high carbon rate of concrete production and the disposal of spent fuel it's the solution. Even with those factors it still is a good solution.
 
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Nuclear fission reactors are absolutely necessary, if we're going to decarbonize our energy sector. Unfortunately, the details are not pretty.

Leaving aside the spent fuel rods (and the much larger amount of radioactive waste that you get when you disassemble the reactor itself after its 40 year useful lifetime is up), you need to think about the input, namely the uranium itself.

The first thing you need to know is that natural uranium is 99.3% ²³⁸U, and only 0.7% ²³⁵U. It's only the ²³⁵U that participates in fission.

You could use the fast neutrons produced in the fission reaction to convert ²³⁸U to Plutonium-239 (neutron capture, followed by beta decay). ²³⁹Pu does undergo fission. In the most efficient designs, a "fast breeder reactor" produces more fissile material than it consumes. That can be reprocessed to fuel other (non-breeder) reactors.

For decades, France was big into breeder reactors, but their last one was shut down in 1997 and no new ones are planned. More modestly, Canada's CANDU reactors burn unenriched natural uranium. Just enough ²³⁸U is converted to ²³⁹Pu to keep the fission reaction going longer. Because of that, they use 30-40% less mined uranium per MWhr of electricity generated than do light-water reactors.

The US and most of the rest of the world use light-water reactors. They burn enriched uranium, whose ²³⁵U content has been increased to 2%-5%. What you do with the depleted uranium that's left over is an interesting question. Traditionally, it's been used for artillery shells (14% heavier than lead). Maybe there are other, less problematic uses.

But, in any case, the takeaway is that at most 0.7% of the uranium that's dug out of the ground is used to produce energy in an LWR. I say "at most", because there's one thing I haven't told you yet: neutron poisoning means that in conventional LWRs, the fission reaction shuts down long before all the ²³⁵U is consumed. In some designs, as little as 5% of the available ²³⁵U is consumed (that's 5% of 0.7% = 0.035% of the uranium dug out of the ground).

There are ways around this. The biggest neutron poison is ¹³⁵Xe (followed by ⁸³Kr). Both of those are gases. In a molten salt fission reactor, the nuclear fuel is in liquid form (rather than the solid form in conventional fuel rods). There, the Xenon and Krypton, which would otherwise poison the fission reaction, just bubble to the surface and disappear. Of course, this is just a design proposal and no such power plant has been built yet.

So, barring a dramatic resuscitation of the breeder reactor program, we are actually facing a problem. The world runs out of exploitable ²³⁵U in less than a century at current rates of usage, and a lot faster if we launch a building spree of LWRs.

Update: I said something slightly wrong above. After ¹³⁵Xe, the second most important neutron poison is ¹⁴⁹Sm (not ⁸³Kr). Samarium is not a gas, so the molten salt reactor design doesn't get rid of it, as it does with ¹³⁵Xe and ⁸³Kr. Apologies if that led anyone astray.
 
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Nuclear fission reactors are absolutely necessary, if we're going to decarbonize our energy sector. Unfortunately, the details are not pretty.

Leaving aside the spent fuel rods (and the much larger amount of radioactive waste that you get when you disassemble the reactor itself after its 40 year useful lifetime is up), you need to think about the input, namely the uranium itself.

The first thing you need to know is that natural uranium is 99.3% ²³⁸U, and only 0.7% ²³⁵U. It's only the ²³⁵U that participates in fission.

You could use the fast neutrons produced in the fission reaction to convert ²³⁸U to Plutonium-239 (neutron capture, followed by beta decay). ²³⁹Pu does undergo fission. In the most efficient designs, a "fast breeder reactor" produces more fissile material than it consumes. That can be reprocessed to fuel other (non-breeder) reactors.

For decades, France was big into breeder reactors, but their last one was shut down in 1997 and no new ones are planned. More modestly, Canada's CANDU reactors burn unenriched natural uranium. Just enough ²³⁸U is converted to ²³⁹Pu to keep the fission reaction going longer. Because of that, they use 30-40% less mined uranium per MWhr of electricity generated than do light-water reactors.

The US and most of the rest of the world use light-water reactors. They burn enriched uranium, whose ²³⁵U content has been increased to 2%-5%. What you do with the depleted uranium that's left over is an interesting question. Traditionally, it's been used for artillery shells (14% heavier than lead). Maybe there are other, less problematic uses.

But, in any case, the takeaway is that at most 0.7% of the uranium that's dug out of the ground is used to produce energy in an LWR. I say "at most", because there's one thing I haven't told you yet: neutron poisoning means that in conventional LWRs, the fission reaction shuts down long before all the ²³⁵U is consumed. In some designs, as little as 5% of the available ²³⁵U is consumed (that's 5% of 0.7% = 0.035% of the uranium dug out of the ground).

There are ways around this. The biggest neutron poison is ¹³⁵Xe (followed by ⁸³Kr). Both of those are gases. In a molten salt fission reactor, the nuclear fuel is in liquid form (rather than the solid form in conventional fuel rods). There, the Xenon and Krypton, which would otherwise poison the fission reaction, just bubble to the surface and disappear. Of course, this is just a design proposal and no such power plant has been built yet.

So, barring a dramatic resuscitation of the breeder reactor program, we are actually facing a problem. The world runs out of exploitable ²³⁵U in less than a century at current rates of usage, and a lot faster if we launched a building spree of LWRs.
wOw! A major issue there for sure with resource availability.
 
@samsa nuclear is looking reallly good. Other than the high carbon rate of concrete production and the disposal of spent fuel it's the solution. Even with those factors it still is a good solution.
The impediment to nuclear is fear. In the US our legal system makes it possible to block the construction of nuclear plants for many years and sometimes forever.
 
Aside from the limited usable supply of ²³⁵U, there are a host of other problems in trying to scale up nuclear power to supply a significant fraction of the world's energy needs (15 TW). A really good analysis is this one in the Proceedings of the IEEE.

Scaling up from the current 400 GW to 1 TW is probably feasible (and probably necessary). That'll cut the estimated 90 years of usable supply of ²³⁵U in half. But much more than 1 TW just isn't possible.
 
I'm telling you, orbiting solar is where it is at......one day.....eventually......maybe 50 years away like fusion, except I think it might really happen then (unlike fusion).
 
I'm telling you, orbiting solar is where it is at......one day.....eventually......maybe 50 years away like fusion, except I think it might really happen then (unlike fusion).

Eventually, humankind will build a Dyson Sphere and then all our energy needs will be solved. We just need to survive long enough to get there.

In the shorter term, floating solar or even floating solar combined with offshore wind and wave energy provide a possible avenue to massively scale up renewable energy production without having to launch things into space.
 
The solution will have to come from two directions: reduced energy consumption, and renewable energy production. The current crunch at European energy markets shows that the price mechanism is a powerful tool to concentrate people's minds. Solar panels were already just about the best investment home owners could do, and at a larger scale wind power is now more than competitive. Neither need subsidies anymore to be competitive. Both, however, take a bit of time to implement on a significantly larger scale, and both require a beefed up European electrical grid, which demands public involvement and probably also public investment. But it is doable, even if it will take some time.
At the other end of the equation, reducing energy consumption also helps. This is where state intervention is probably needed to speed up the process and reinforce market trends, with stricter building codes on home and office insulation, mandatory heat pumps in new homes instead of gas boilers, speed limits on the Autobahn, contruction of more high speed rail links to replace short and medium distance air travel etc. There will not be one single solution, but the current shortage will certainly speed up the process even if the short run challenges are big. It is really an economics text book case.
 
The rule of thumb used for US wind and solar is 30% of maximum output. In Texas during optimum conditions for wind and moderate demand wind producers are able to pay utilities to take their output because the subsidies are so high. There's no point in arguing with that character. I gave up a few days ago.
just to give a bit of geography advice the UK isn’t in Texas or the USA. There was no reference to Solar!
The subsidy figures I quoted were from the ref.org.uk website, not the back of a cigarette packet.
 
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Until a few years ago Dutch windfarms had to be subsidized, but this is no longer the case. Efficiency has increased a lot, in part because the turbines are larger and larger and taller and taller. At a now common height of 200 metres, there is almost always enough wind. Admittedly, the Netherlands have always been in a favourable location for windmills.
 
just to give a bit of geography advice the UK isn’t in Texas or the USA. There was no reference to Solar!
The subsidy figures I quoted were from the ref.org.uk website, not the back of a cigarette packet.
I wasn't meaning to step on your toes. However, 11% to 14% tells me it's not worth doing wind in the UK. If you drive through West Texas, the number of wind turbines is overwhelming. The problem is it's far away from the major population centers making transmission expensive and the losses are high. The initial investment in transmission was $6B and another $1.5B is being looked at. Electric customers are paying 5.5 cents per kw/hr for the transmission while the wind producers are receiving enormous subsidies. Texas electric rates are low, but it's a fantasy.
 
I wasn't meaning to step on your toes. However, 11% to 14% tells me it's not worth doing wind in the UK. If you drive through West Texas, the number of wind turbines is overwhelming. The problem is it's far away from the major population centers making transmission expensive and the losses are high. The initial investment in transmission was $6B and another $1.5B is being looked at. Electric customers are paying 5.5 cents per kw/hr for the transmission while the wind producers are receiving enormous subsidies. Texas electric rates are low, but it's a fantasy.
Apologies for the post just got out of hospital had an operation on my nose. Looks like I’ve gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson.
Went back to check my 11% to 14% figures. According to Forbes UK wind power in 2020 accountEd for 25% of generated power, currently it’s averaging 7%. Never thought it would vary so much, still they do depend on the weather. Can use the photo to scare the kids.

16F1B616-B4C3-4A38-9F5C-283EC9C7DAA6.jpeg
 
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