Gridwatch Overnight Tonight 14/06/18

[dan_b]

Lowest ever working weekday carbon intensity on the UK Grid. Last record was 108 gCO2/kWh 11:30 7th June 2017 and it’ll probably go a little lower still.

[M]

Well that's jolly good news old chap! 

[gnarly]

Also just spotted this which is a forward prediction of carbon intensity... for next 96 hours !  Has an API too

http://carbonintensity.org.uk

[MeatyFool]

just installed the app dan_b uses - first result 91 gCO2/kWh!!!!!

70.7% top three sources (non-FF, wind, nuclear, solar)

Meatyfool..

[phoooby]

That carbon intensity link above is good. South West region is currently 2g co2 per kWh !. Mostly solar, wind and nuclear, with 0.8% gas. Very impressive !

[djs63]

The north east data is very similar to phooby’s south west. Bit cheesed that so much electricityis coming from nuclear which produces a bit less CO2 but has other problems

[dan_b]

Seeing as we've got them we might as well keep using the nuclear plants, surely?

I'm not sure if this App accounts for embedded wind in its calculations?

[azps]

Seeing as we've got them we might as well keep using the nuclear plants, surely?

Well, maybe. Let's think about the economics. How much does it cost to produce one marginal unit of nuclear electricity? Based on the plant has been dropping off the US grid because it can't compete with gas, about £20/MWh. So far so good, that's pretty cheap. Now we just need to add in an estimate for the third party liability risk. Now, that's highly uncertain, but based on the work of a German specialist in scientific advice to the insurance industry, Versicherungsforen Leipzig GmbH, it's in the range €₂₀₁₁ 140-6730/MWh. Let's take the bottom of the range (even though UK plants are now quite old and have known problems such as the graphite block cracking). That puts our estimate of the social cost of nuclear at at least £140/MWh. There's all the waste and everything too, but already we can see that even with a carbon price of £150/CO_2e, gas still looks better than nuclear.

So, economically, it probably is more efficient to close down the nuclear plants now, if we will substitute them with gas in the short term, and renewables within a year or two. How quickly could we build say 10 GW of onshore wind and 10 GW of PV? Probably 2 years. So really, yes, we should be telling nukes now to wind down, no more refuelling (which gives them a 6-18 month life expectancy or so). And get on with building renewables at full pace.

[djs63]

Yes we should go for renewables quickly but do we also need storage even on a daily basis?

PV presumably potentially peaks at midday though it depends on clouds etc which does not coincide with evening peak demand. Wind is variable. Yes to renewables but need a smoothing system.

[phoooby]

Add the economic cost of £20 to the social cost of £140 per MWh gives a figure higher than the tidal lagoon which has equally reliable and predictable output.

[desperate]

Seeing as we've got them we might as well keep using the nuclear plants, surely?

Well, maybe. Let's think about the economics. How much does it cost to produce one marginal unit of nuclear electricity? Based on the plant has been dropping off the US grid because it can't compete with gas, about £20/MWh. So far so good, that's pretty cheap. Now we just need to add in an estimate for the third party liability risk. Now, that's highly uncertain, but based on the work of a German specialist in scientific advice to the insurance industry, Versicherungsforen Leipzig GmbH, it's in the range €₂₀₁₁ 140-6730/MWh. Let's take the bottom of the range (even though UK plants are now quite old and have known problems such as the graphite block cracking). That puts our estimate of the social cost of nuclear at at least £140/MWh. There's all the waste and everything too, but already we can see that even with a carbon price of £150/CO_2e, gas still looks better than nuclear.

So, economically, it probably is more efficient to close down the nuclear plants now, if we will substitute them with gas in the short term, and renewables within a year or two. How quickly could we build say 10 GW of onshore wind and 10 GW of PV? Probably 2 years. So really, yes, we should be telling nukes now to wind down, no more refuelling (which gives them a 6-18 month life expectancy or so). And get on with building renewables at full pace.

Shouldn't we be comparing that social cost of nuclear with the social cost of dumping all that co2 into the atmosphere. Serious question here,what would the likely insurance premium be against the climate going a bit nuts?

Desp

[Philip R]

azps,
Your accelerated nuclear closedown proposals are very dangerous. Increased CO2 emissions, higher gas and electricity prices,  less diversity in the uk Electricity supply, and greater reliance on some tenuous gas supplies. All in all heading for a nationwide grid system failure.

I believe the climate change panel recommendations put a massive cost to society if climate change accelerates.

Philip R

[azps]

Shouldn't we be comparing that social cost of nuclear with the social cost of dumping all that co2 into the atmosphere. Serious question here,what would the likely insurance premium be against the climate going a bit nuts?

Definitely: that's why I included a carbon cost of £150/tCO_2e. Estimating marginal social damage cost of carbon is difficult, but a range of £100-£200 is in line with the upper numbers in the literature. If we were talking about long-term increases in emissions, that would be a serious problem. But we're not. We're talking about a very small number of gigawatts of emissions for a couple of years.

As for Philip R's "nationwide grid system failure", no, not at all. Plenty of countries manage perfectly well without any nuclear and don't have this nationwide grid system failure. Higher prices? Well, that's a question of how the costs are allocated. As I tried to show with the calculations above, there is a net gain in economic efficiency from a phase-out of nuclear and a corresponding ramp-up in renewables. That means a net economic gain for the country. Does it mean increased gas consumption? Well, with the renewables getting built at about the same rate as the nuclear is decommissioned, then no, it doesn't. However, even if it did mean burning a bit more gas for a couple of years, the cost calculations are still favourable.

Yes, that certainly should set some alarm bells ringing: can it really be true that the marginal liability costs of nuclear are so large that they become larger than the marginal damage costs of carbon from burning a bit more gas? It does depend on a whole bunch of things that we have very limited information on, which means there is very high uncertainty on it. Crucially, what is the probability of a UK nuclear accident of the scale of Fukushima or Chernobyl? NB this is not asking what are the chances of identical accidents of either (negligible); but rather, what are the chances of a release of radioactive material through any cause on that scale (non-negligible)? And if it were to happen, what are the odds that the material would end up on economically productive parts of the country, rather than (as happened after Fukushima) there being incredible good luck (after the terrible luck of the earthquake & tsunami) that resulted in almost all of the airborne material being blown out into a gigantic ocean where it was very quickly diluted and carried away from detectable harm. Because had those winds blown in another direction, towards Tokyo say, then the Fukushima nuclear disaster wouldn't have cost a mere £100-200 billion or so, it could have been ten or fifty times higher. And that's how the liability costs risk become inordinate. That's why no sane insurer would dream of taking on that risk. And if they wouldn't, why should the taxpayer do so?

Regarding phoooby's point: I think the lagoon is still the wrong answer, because it's more expensive than onshore wind or PV, and is unlikely to produce as much power as our remaining nukes. Tidal barrages across all our major estuaries could produce mean power of that order (I reckon around 5.6 GW for England plus some for Scotland), but that would be a 10 to 20-year project to build them. Now, I think we probably should build them (we'll need the barrages for flood protection from rising seas anyway, so may as well make them generate power too), and we should start now, but that's a little too slow to help with the economic inefficiencies of keeping our old nukes running.

For djs63's question: yes, we do need additional support for things like frequency reserve and storage: and what we've learnt from the recent capacity & frequency auctions is that building that stuff is much cheaper than most of us had dared to hope for. So right now, the marginal costs of wind and pv intermittency on the British grid are very low.

One way to balance out all these trade-offs is to structure the market so that it can discover an efficient allocation. That means taxing fossil fuels at the upper end (because of the asymmetric risk) of their marginal social damage cost; and taxing nuclear at its marginal social risk cost. I'd expect that we'd see is both fossil fuels and nuclear vanishing off the grid fairly promptly, and renewables getting built far faster than we've seen to date. Yes, that would definitely make the cost of energy shoot up for a while, until the substitutes were built. It would also bring in huge amounts to the exchequer which could be distributed back to citizens and non-energy businesses, thus leaving them no worse off on average. And it would mean that many energy-efficiency measures suddenly become a lot more viable economically.

A

[M]

One way to balance out all these trade-offs is to structure the market so that it can discover an efficient allocation. That means taxing fossil fuels at the upper end (because of the asymmetric risk) of their marginal social damage cost; and taxing nuclear at its marginal social risk cost. I'd expect that we'd see is both fossil fuels and nuclear vanishing off the grid fairly promptly, and renewables getting built far faster than we've seen to date. Yes, that would definitely make the cost of energy shoot up for a while, until the substitutes were built. It would also bring in huge amounts to the exchequer which could be distributed back to citizens and non-energy businesses, thus leaving them no worse off on average. And it would mean that many energy-efficiency measures suddenly become a lot more viable economically.

A

The problem here is that the cost savings are hidden, since they are either paid via general taxation, such as NHS costs, AGW mitigation, insurance/liability, whilst the RE costs are highly visible and slapped onto the energy bills via the green tariff.

For the majority of the public, a shift from the hidden to the visible will yet again convince them that RE is pushing up costs. My position is simple, all RE subsidies are a result of FF costs, therefore they are not RE costs, but FF costs, but try telling that to someone complaining about the bills going up.

I'm not against what you are saying, I support it entirely, just pointing out that the 'big picture' is not one that many bill payers are interested in looking at, sadly. It's far easier to blame the 'greenies'.

[dan_b]

Thanks for the detailed responses there - good insight and some key issues raised I’d not thought about.

On the flip side, UK wind has gone from a curtailed 13GW to 4GW in the space of 24 hours and last week was basically at zero for a couple of days.  As we continue to add wind capacity those peak and trough deltas are only going to increase - do we really have faith that sufficient storage capacity can be built at a cost that doesn’t then make wind massively costly again?