*spin-off* Power issues and... New Zealand.

[Mintmaster]

Mintmaster youve still living in this world of nuclear will turn out exactly how it saiz in the glossy prospectus, look at PROVEN nuclears track record, its notorious for having budget/time overruns.

Why do you keep repeating this? I AM looking at the cost overruns. If I was using glossy numbers, I would be using $2000-$3000 per kW. I would be comparing wind to AECL's plant cost of $3B/GW, not $10.8B/GW total cost. I would be looking at Olkiluto's planned cost, not the projected overrun cost.

Why do you keep distorting how cheap wind is? Why did you completely ignore my concrete example using your own source?

Wind works for NZ because you have high winds and gobs of almost free energy storage due to the geography. You're also lucky that the hydro storage isn't controlled by some greedy owners, because they could charge through the roof for electricity when wind dies down. It happens even without wind variation:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1306600&postcount=80
Saying that only 10% of the time wind isn't blowing is grossly misleading:
http://windenergy.org.nz/documents/conference09/BruceSmith.pdf page 12

Electricity is an inelastic good. It's very difficult for people to cut down demand when supply is tight.

OK heres a real world example
china notorious for not giving a monkeys what the populace thinks -

China is a completely different market. They have to pay almost as much as the west for nuclear plants because expertise is expensive and they have to import a lot of specialized equipment. When building wind, labour and concrete is dirt cheap.

When they run out of peaking capacity from hydro and natural gas, they're not going to build wind anymore. Germany is planning to shut down its nuclear power, thinking renewables are good enough, but now they import gobs of energy (ironically often produced by coal or nuclear) when the sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow, and thus they aren't energy independent anymore.

Q/ why has wallstreet decided to not build any nuclear reactors in the US for 30 years, if its such a cheap method?

That's plain obvious. GreenPeace, Ralph Nader, Sierra Club, and other FUD organizations. The public was dead scared of nuclear power, and it was political suicide for anyone to allow it. Besides, coal was a bit cheaper and had less capital cost.

Only when people started caring about the environment and realizing how hypocritical those organizations are did fear of it start to wane. Nuclear is expensive due to excessive regulation and fear. The cost floor is far lower than for renewables, and we saw this in the first generation plants. It can go down again once some new plants are built to alleviate the fear and reduce the risk premiums, but even before then it is cheaper than an apples to apples comparison with wind.

 

[zed]

Saying that only 10% of the time wind isn't blowing is grossly misleading:

Project West Wind is expected to generate electricity over 90% of the time, and it is expected to have a capacity factor of around 47% (capacity factor is the amount of electricity actually generated relative to the amount that would have been produced if the generator had been running at its full output over the same period).

check out the annual reports from the companies for the last few years with the actual figures in they have pretty much achieved their windgoals each year, in fact according to their data over the year wind has performed higher than hydro!
u can sorta see that in the above graphic where wind is operating at ~85% capacity and hydro ~50%.
I just had a look at the live data http://www.em6live.co.nz/PlanningRegion.aspx?planningregion=uni
again wind is easily performing at ~85%, which is better than any other energy generating source

That's plain obvious. GreenPeace, Ralph Nader, Sierra Club, and other FUD organizations. The public was dead scared of nuclear power, and it was political suicide for anyone to allow it. Besides, coal was a bit cheaper and had less capital cost.

from a one year old study
“Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power,”

Contrary to historical revisionism now promoted by some, it was not the environmentalists who
stopped the growth of U.S. nuclear power. Environmentalists were uniformly ineffectual, as
government policies at both the Federal and state levels continued to favor nuclear power.
It was also not the Three Mile Island accident that caused the nuclear industry’s collapse. By the
time Three Mile Island happened in 1979, a wave of cancellations of new nuclear plant orders was
already underway. If anything, the accident simply capped off a trend which was already occurring.
Utility executives and Wall Street financiers were the ones who stopped nuclear power’s expansion
in the 1970's. As more evidence of the business risks and the costs associated with nuclear
power became clear through utilities’ own experiences, utility boards across the country, and the
financial houses who fund them, stopped considering nuclear power a serious future option.
Orders for new plants that had already been advanced, were quietly withdrawn.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/01/nuclear_power.html

And in a story last week on nuclear power’s supposed comeback, Time magazine notes that nuclear plants’ capital costs are “out of control,” concluding:

Most efficiency improvements have been priced at 1¢ to 3¢ per kilowatt-hour, while new nuclear energy is on track to cost 15¢ to 20¢ per kilowatt-hour. And no nuclear plant has ever been completed on budget.

heres my coop-de-grace
Your comment

Do the math. After 40 years, wind+CCGT costs $87B more. You can add interest to the $10B extra capital cost of the nuclear option, but it barely makes a difference.

So if theres mountains of money to be made, why are not the bankers etc not investing in nuclear?
They have no doubt done the cost studies to the Nth degrees better than us, with more intelligent people than us.
If Nuclear is such a money making scheme you would think they couldnt invest in it fast enuf but they in reality are not(*), as they say
Bullshit walks, money talks

One of the 3 jobs I do is gambling, what that involves is being able to assess risks well, and to cut through the BS

(*)Perhaps you could email them pointing out the error of their ways, that their studies are wrong, their maths is incorrect etc and in fact nuclear is the cheapest option

 

[Mintmaster]

u can sorta see that in the above graphic where wind is operating at ~85% capacity and hydro ~50%.

You're missing the point.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/01/nuclear_power.html

In the 70's and 80's, interest rates were very high. It completely turns the tables towards coal.

In the 90's and 00's, it was indeed the environmental movement keeping nuclear off the table. Very little renewable generation was built because it was way too expensive. So they just stuck with coal.

So if theres mountains of money to be made, why are not the bankers etc not investing in nuclear?

For the last fucking time, it's because coal is cheaper and less risky. They build wind or solar ONLY when they get subsidies, guaranteed price contracts, or unique situations like NZ. Otherwise it has always been coal for baseload and gas for peaking once hydro is max'd out.

I never said nuclear was cheaper than coal. Maybe some other posters did, but not me.

Nuclear absolutely WOULD be a money making scheme IF it got the same subsidies as wind, or the 10c/kWh subsidy that hoom made up. The 15-20c/kWh figure in your Time article is complete BS with no reference whatsoever, and anyone who knows how to use a calculator can see that.

(EDIT: I missed the paragraph after the one you quoted, which gives 17-22 c/kWh for construction. You know how they calculated that? By assuming principal+interest of the $7.5B/GW construction cost would turn into $61B/GW over 50 years, because you need to generate 15% ROE. What a bunch of crap. Who the fuck is going to get 15% return nowadays? The gov't is practically begging for construction projects to stimulate the economy.)

Money does indeed talk. That we have only a trickling of wind production in Ontario when offering them 15c/kWh guaranteed for 20 years should tell you how much it really costs and how poorly suited it is for the free market. If you want it to be a major part of new generation, then you have to consider all the costs it places on the rest of the system, and I'm not even talking about the grid.