Electricity prices - what next?

Add £4k to the cost of a heat pump and EVCP and they don't look very cost-effective. I have looked at the cost of replacing my CH boiler with a condensing one and the pay-back period was up to 50 years. It certainly wouldn't be cost effective to put in heat pumps, and I'd need several, which really would annoy the neighbours.

I am well aware that there are other costs in switching to heat pump + EVs. The cost of the pump, the cost of the EVs, the cost of the chargers, and the cost of removing your previous boiler and connecting the HP to your heating system, for example. As well as the cost of prepping your home for pure-HP warmth (in my case, likely a six-figure sum with current tech). I was just querying the £15K figure for connection, as you did.

Any sensible energy company would buy futures when offering a fixed-price contract, but it seems that the ones who have failed in UK did not do that.

It seems that Hinckley C is being built to contain a Chernobyl style cock-up. Granted the consequences of contaminating densely populated UK would be far worse than sparsely populated northern Ukraine, but are our engineering systems that bad? As for Fukushima, what do you expect when you build in an earthquake zone?

There are many ways of avoiding a rerun of Chernobyl. Not performing experiments on your kit without having performed an accurate hazard analysis is one of them.

The EPR design being built at Hinckley is also at Flammanville (started 2007) and Olkiluoto (started 2005), neither of which are on-line yet. Any NPP is a complex piece of engineering. The question is not whether it is "that bad", but rather whether any system that complex can be engineered by any collection of humans to be free of catastrophic failure. (There are no satisfactory engineering risk analyse techniques that can accommodate scenarios that absolutely must never happen. And that is even before you consider the situation that somebody deliberately tries to get such a scenario to happen.)

Also note that all the NPPs in California, as well as many in the US Mid West, are built in "earthquake zones". I wouldn't attribute the Fukushima accident primarily to that. How I do attribute it can be seen in my iet.tv talk at https://scsc.uk/scsc-116 or read in a version of the paper at https://rvs-bi.de/publications/Papers/LadkinFukushimaAccOnlineVersion.pdf

No one has yet described how our offshore wind (much of which may well go offline today due to strong winds) can ever provide this 24/7 supply, deal with surges, or rapidly changing supply conditions, like the end of a TV programme when hundreds of thousands of kettles are turned on at once.

Isn't that the same issue when we had mostly thermal (coal and nuclear) stations that were incapable of rapid adjustments in output - the solution then was to build the likes of the Dinorwig pump-storage system - specifically designed to deal with events like 'TV pickup' - even in the days of just 4 TV channels and so much greater 'synchonising of kettles' it seemed to work well, even if they had to resort to closely watching the TV for the exact timing of the start of the advert break and keep the turnbines 'spinning in air' for a few minutes beforehand to minimise the start up time. As far as I know it's still there and still working (along with a few other smaller sister plants).

If there's spare wind capacity, then a similar if a little slower effect can be achieved by altering the angle of the turbine blades to catch less wind, but keep the whole thing pointing into the wind as normal. The blades can then be returned to their normal operating position within a few tens of seconds to increase generation.

Shorter bursts of demand can also be fed from battery storage systems (there are already several multi-10s-of MW/MWh sites in the UK).

    - Andy.

Chris Pearson said:

It seems that Hinckley C is being built to contain a Chernobyl style cock-up.

Very unlikely as the Chernobyl RBMK reactors will never be built again. The only ones left in operation are in Russia. All of which have been modified.

Peter Bernard Ladkin said:

I wouldn't attribute the Fukushima accident primarily to that.

Indeed, a rare double earthquake, which the reactors withstood followed by the 46ft tsunami that did the damage. The backup diesel generators were located seaward of the plant on skids and were swept away. Four of the 6 reactors were stupidly built on too low an elevation.

Well, the bots are getting better. Still some way to go, though.

Yes they do that Andy, but there is a windspeed where the blades must be locked with brakes to pevent damage. That is the problem, the range of variable pitch, particularly at low wind speeds. The efficiency of blades is in reality quite small at low wind speeds, but this is a critical area to collect power and affects the entire machine design. Making the blades suitable for higher speed makes the low end much worse.

The aerodynamics of turbine blades is rather more sophisticated than this impression would suggest. Let me also point out some incoherence in the formulation of this contribution: "windspeed where the blades must be locked ... that is the problem... particularly at low wind speeds."