Levelised Cost Of Energy

 Costs by generation type:

Wind vs Time

PV vs time

Coal and gas vs time

It seems that coal and gas are rising with time whilst renewable are falling.
From these figures it appears that wind is now generating at a cost similar to coal and gas without carbon capture and storage.

Data from World Energy Perspective  Cost of Energy Technologies
Published by World Energy Council in 2013

The only data on wind turbine build and running cost I have found is here
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/balloo_wood_wind_turbine

 

UK National grid - Rate of Change of Power

One of the many (usually spurious) reasons people give for not installing wind power is that the grid will have to run warm start and spinning reserve (see http://climateandstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/national-grids-reserves.html ) to cover the sudden loss of wind power.
This power generation is expensive.

The website http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ connects to a download of national grid status at 5 minute intervals.

I have analysed the data - calculating the slope of power over 3 adjacent data points (15 minute interval) for each available data point. If any of the three data points is zero then no data is plotted.

There are some oddities these have been plotted but the point is allowed off scale to keep valid data to be on a sensible scale:

The plot colour indicates a different vertical scale. (scales have been corrected)

15 days of service

Over 2 days this looks like:

2 days of service

It looks as if wind can vary by as much as 15MW / minute
But this compares with demand which can vary by 170MW/minute

Closing in on a few hours shows:

6 hours - Coal replaces Nuclear

It is interesting to note that at 17 hours 10 minutes it appears as if wind is used for balancing - all fast reaction generators and wind show a drop.

It is also significant that there is little impact of wind variation showing on the fast reactor generators.

Finally Wind output shown over the same few hours:

Wind power output added

French Nuclear Plants Have Problems

French electricity imports rise as cold spell dampens nuclear outputLondon (Platts)--26Nov2013/811 am EST/1311 GMT French net power imports slumped early Tuesday after EDF suffered an unplanned outage at its 900 MW Fessenheim 2 nuclear power reactor and demand rose on colder weather, the latest data from grid operator RTE showed.

The Fessenheim 2 reactor was taken off the grid at 04:00 local time Tuesday (0300 GMT), and no restart date was given.

The outage follows capacity limitations at several other EDF reactors, including the 900 MW Chinon 1 and Gravelines 2 reactors.

Lower temperatures increased French power demand by 2.3 GW on the day to 75.0 GW at 08:45 Tuesday and national power imports climbed from 500 MW Monday to almost 3 GW Tuesday

 

 

2013-12-14 And still the French purchase our power:

And its not just during peak demand. There seems to be something amiss with the French grid. The interconnector power must be more expensive then home grown electricity. So why do they not bring their reserves on line??
Back to normal?

The Interconnector is now fixed and UK is again buying 2GW from the French!

The wind generation is now at least 6GW (windy!) and possibly as high as 9GW (some generation is not recorded on grid (used locally)

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

So UK was supplying up to 2GW to the French power grid. Another example of a complex system working.
However it is surprising that the French do not increase the output of their cheap(???) nuclear stations instead of buying from the UK. Perhaps they are having real problems with their system?

The UK Storm of 28th October and the National Grid

The storm of 2013-10-28 managed to isolate a UK nuclear station from the National Grid leading to headlines such as:

Dungeness nuclear power station shuts down following hurricane-strength winds

St Jude’s UK storm forces the Dungeness B reactor in Kent to shut down for up to a week

The isolation from the grid means that essential systems controlling the reactor only have diesel generator backup and so for safety the reactor is shut down.

 

Just How is the loss of 1GW handled by the grid - the two plots that follow use data generated every 5 minutes (the dotted curves use the scale on the right of the plots all vertical scales are in MW):

 

 

 

Note that the bulk of the transient is compensated by pumped storage during the 1st 5 minutes (actually responds within 12 seconds) Hydro and coal and gas (CCGT) are also ramped up and pumped storage is reduced.  However at this time in the morning demand is rapidly increasing and coal and gas output cannot provide further rapid increase an so pumped supply is again increased,

 



 The plot shows data at 5 minute intervals so the immediacy of the Pumped storage is not visible.

 

 

It is also worth noting that the rarely used OCGT (inefficient gas) is brought online in case it is needed (only 50MW is utilised - past OCGT has provided up to 400MW).

 

So this aging reactor of approximately 1GW switching off is handled adequately by the system. In particular the instant response pumped storage.

 

The proposed Nuclear plant at Hinkley Point C will use 2 * 1.6GW reactors Losing one of these will equire spinning reserve (as provided by pumped storage and spinning turbines of other thermal stations)

 

Pumped storage:

 Each of Dinorwig's six generating units can produce 288MW of electricity, offering a combined station output of 1728MW.

Ffestiniog's four 90MW units have a combined generating capacity of 360MW.

 

I.e. a total of around 2GW. This will handle one of Hinkley's reactors but not both.

 

Energy costs

UK fuel costs

Note electricity prices well behind raw fuel costs.
 
 GERMAN electricity price at auction

Note pronounced dip in price during peak solar output

FRENCH electricity price

Note no real solar dip and cost is greater than Gemany despite being nearly all nuclear

2013-06-23
Interesting UK Grid and wind:

Wind is currently producing the same energy as coal. Also note the depressed peaks in daily use as wind begins to generate (however it is olso necessary to allow for the fact the wind increased at the weekend=low use).
Note also the grid safely handled an increase from about 500MW to 5GW without incident
The graphics are from the site
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/