Offshore wind development, needed but govt has head in the sand about fines for failing on emissions

Government to hit ‘nuclear button’ granting itself emergency powers to solve infrastructure crisis

So they may be getting the finger out.

One way to think of the potential fines is as zero cost funding for infrastructure because you'll have to spend the billions one way or another.

We need power before we get fined and we need something that can actually reduce emissions.

Nuclear can't do either.

[RANT]

In the first 15 years from it's original start date Flamanville 3 will be lucky to produce the equivalent of 1 year's worth of electricity.

In 2002 France started the ball rolling on a new nuclear power plant with an expected delivery date of 2012. The design was the latest in a series of 200MW-300MW incremental upgrades of the previous French designs coupled with the safety systems of German reactors which have had some of the highest cumulative outputs of any reactors. So you'd imagine it would be very low risk.

• It was connected to the grid last year (only just - 21st December)
• It's had outages and still hasn't got to full power yet.
• It will go offline for at least 50 weeks in September for repairs.

Oh and the cost ballooned from €3.3B to €20Bn (not including inflation)

Even if we could get nuclear tomorrow, the spinning reserve requirements for nuclear means it can't ever deliver emission savings so there is no role for nuclear. You need to replace 75% of power of the largest generator on the grid within 5 seconds. (Last year the US had an average of just over one SCRAM for every two reactors.) At present the only way to provide that much power is by running gas turbines inefficiently at lighter load, burning gas 24/7 (If you used another reactor as spinning reserve you then have the problem of how to get rid of a lot of surplus electricity without depressing prices)

Renewables too would need spinning reserve but would only need 1/4 of it 1/4 of the time due to smaller generating units and not needing it if there's sufficient wind or solar online. And some of it could probably be done with batteries.

You also need to be able to replace nuclear power for a month or two every 18-24 months when down for refuelling and maintenance. ( ie longer than any Dunkelflaute )

And nuclear can't do peaking either so it needs support in that role.

In theory you could use storage and biomass and biogas to handle the spinning reserve/backup/peaking but that would allow renewables to take over.

[/RANT]

OMG! Dunkelflaute was so bad that (excluding hydro and biomass and biogas and the incinerators and the CHP and any demand shedding) we were getting nearly 50% of our power from the other renewables and imports.

And that's 50% out of a very, very hard limit of 75%

I'd image we'd have done better if the Celtic interconnector was finished. And our installed wind is still below maximum demand so it's still early days on our renewables rollout.

As you say "one of many".

We are in the EU so common defence and there's the $200Bn of Russian funds currently frozen. And we are interconnected with UN Security Council members who have nuclear weapons and are #1 and #2 on the "countries that won the most wars" list.

€1.6bn is essentially zero cost compared to the €20Bn fine we could face for not decarbonising.