ConDemCollusion takes
a shot at me
I got this response to a comment I made at The Guardian which shows the
technical naiveté prevailing in the “green” ranks. To be honest, if I were as
ignorant about reality I would definitely be advocating a gazillion windmills
and pumped storage.....
Ugly Photograph of Dinorwig Pumped
Power Station in Great Britain,
selected to make it look ugly on purpose
(geograph.org.uk)
ConDemCollusion´s post
24 August 2014 4:45pm
“You appear to know very little about energy storage. The cost of
creating 1.7GW of pumped water storage in the 1970s was less than £500 million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Granted the same capacity would cost more nowadays although the civil
engineering techniques we now employ are also superior.
Compared with the £40 billion cost of new reactors at Hinkley Point
pumped storage like Dinorwig that allows surplus energy to be stored (from
renewables like solar PV and Wind) to overcome supply intermittency could be
built for a tenth of the cost and none of the toxic waste and ticking timebomb
problem nuclear reactors represent.”
So…I decided to look up “Dinorwig Power Station” and found out it´s a
pumped storage facility built by the British government with 1728 mega Watts
(MW) generating capacity. The facility is built in a mountain, and it can store
water to run for a total of six hours.
The plant was built between 1974 and 1984, the actual cost was 425
million pounds, which today would be about $1.5 billion USD (that´s
$1,500,000,000).
But if I look at the wind power intermittency in Germany I get this data
German wind power intermittency
This tells me a large wind power system can suffer from 7 days complete
shutdown in Germany. I decided to use that as a working model. If I assume
seven days is the amount of storage needed, I would need 28 Dinorwig
equivalents. This is what´s required to
cover a 1728 MW wind power farm´s lack of ability to deliver power as needed
when the wind dies.
So, multiply 28 times 1.5 and…..$42 billion USD. That´s very roughly
what it takes to back up the wind power system using pumped storage (for 7
days). I´m going to be kind to my green friends, and I´m going to cut the
number in half because I think I can do it smarter. So the cost comes down to only
$21 billion dollars.
And, if we assume a 1 MW wind turbine costs $2 million USD, then to
generate the 1728 MW then we require $3.456 billion USD for 1728 wind turbines.
Let´s round that off and call it $3.5 billion. This means the wind turbines
backed up by the pumped storage costs (21+3.5) $24.5 billion USD. Or to put it
in a different way, the cost of pumped storage can be about (21/3.5) SIX times
the cost of the wind turbines.
Pretty nice looking wind turbine farm
(intended to make you feel positive
and happy about wind power)
However, what the customer wants is the cost per KWH delivered at home.
So let´s assume we have the impact of the turbines and the pumped power are
$192 per MWH. How did I get this? I assumed the wind turbines would double
their capacity factor because they have that pumped storage hooked up. And I
multiplied by six to account for the pumped power investment ($64 per KWH from
the EIA reference divided by two and multiplied by six).
If we add $16 per MWH for the running (operating costs), we get $208 per
MWH.
I also looked up what it costs for Hinckley Nuclear power station, about
$24 billion USD for a 3200 MW plant. The outfit building the plant has “guaranteed”
an electricity delivery price less than half of the estimated $208 per MWH for
the wind power system with seven days of pumped power back up.
Please understand I grabbed these numbers in a hurry to check whether this guy (or gal) made any sense at all. Therefore if you want a more reliable number you can probably find it. The trick will be to figure out if you can trust the figures, and that´s about all.
Fukushima Radioactive Cloud in Seawater
(intended to scare you)
I don´t advocate nuclear power (right now I advocate nothing), but the British public does need to look at their options very carefully, and make sure they don´t get bs´d.
Conclusion? Most of
the figures we read in The Guardian´s comments sections are garbage.
The original comment
Dinorwig´s own web page
Wind Power Intermittency
Reference for Wind Turbine Cost
Reference for Electricity Costs for various sources (EIA)
Hinckley Nuclear Power Plant
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