The Wind versus Coal thread is getting rather tangled so I will start a new one to look at these points.
The latest Danish 3 GW capacity auction received zero bids:
The conditions for this auction were based on the real and full costs of wind power, no subsidies and you pay for the grid connection.
“The Danish auction system does not foresee any form of state support or revenue stabilisation model – such as the Contracts for Difference (CfD) used in many other European countries. Instead offshore wind developers are asked to pay for the right to build a wind farm. Denmark’s uncapped negative bidding creates an unhealthy race to the bottom and unnecessarily increases the upfront costs for offshore wind developers. On top of that Denmark does not pay for the grid connection to the offshore wind farms, instead developers have to take on these extra costs.”
There was a similar story for the 2023 UK auction:
No new offshore wind project contracts have been bought by developers at a key government auction, dealing a blow to the UK's renewable power strategy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66749344
Australia is starting to move slowly in the direction of nuclear power although there are deep political divides. A recent study looked at the costs of a renewable solution including costs of grid connection, storage and backups compared to a solution including nuclear.
It notes:
“nuclear generates 38% of electricity with just 13% of total capacity.”
“From an economic cost perspective, the economy is much better off in the Progressive scenario with nuclear power in the energy mix compared to AEMO’s preferred Step Change solution using primarily renewables and storages.”
The numbers seem fair and show the influence of capital versus variable costs for nuclear:
3.2.3 Cost of nuclear power
The modelling assumes a cost of nuclear power of $10,000/kW. This is higher than the CSIRO’s recent estimate of the cost of large-scale reactors.10 This assumption is based on a review of the experience of the costs of developing large scale nuclear reactors, including more recent examples. Further, it is assumed there is an annual cost efficiency improvement in the capital cost of nuclear generators of 1% per annum in these costs from 2024 onwards. This is a conservative estimate based on the literature on the learning cost efficiencies when similar units are developed in sequence. The capital costs are amortised over a 50-year period, although realistically new nuclear generators will operate for many more years than this and more than twice the life of renewables. A real variable cost of $30/MWh is also assumed. This is higher than the expected variable cost of nuclear power. This amount is considered sufficient to cover fuel costs, variable and fixed operating and maintenance cost, network costs and decommissioning costs over the life of the power stations.
So which way should we go?
