You seem very sure about that given the only one to have ever got anywhere near going bang in this country was the very first one, which not only was designed when we knew a lot less, it’s purpose wasn’t even to produce electricity.

Statoil’s Hywind project is interesting, if it works and it should, then offshore wind becomes more environmentally friendly and we can put turbines in deeper water.

Indeed, the pilot park off Scotland has now got the go ahead too. I worked on that too – interesting stuff.

Offshore wind – £121 per MWh.

Hinkley Point nuclear – £92.50 per MWh.

Certainly the electricity sale price is part of it, but with nuclear there is a massive hidden cost of decommissioning, which as a friend who works in decommissioning put it, means that essentially no one yet knows the true price of nuclear power generation. See the breakdown of costs (in millions of £) per site at the bottom of this page https://www.nda.gov.uk/what-we-do/costs/

The cost per MWh of offshore wind is also going down every year so could soon be in line with the cost of nuclear you have quoted there, but without all the other costs of nuclear.

By the way, I know the euanmeans website looks all fancy, but if you hadn’t noticed he is basically massively biased against wind power, the king of the nimbys perhaps! Expect opinion disguised as fact anyway.

means that essentially no one yet knows the true price of nuclear power generation. See the breakdown of costs (in millions of £) per site at the bottom of this page https://www.nda.gov.uk/what-we-do/costs/

Classic mistake of mixing historic and future, the stuff referred to there is not compatible with future stuff.

In the short term throw up some cheap CCGT’s to deal with the peaks

The latest generation efficient CCGTs are not particularly cheap to build at around £350k – £400k per MW of capacity (and unit sizes of anywhere between 400MW-1000MW. And to operate at its most efficiently (to give an appropriate return to the developer) would run as base load with moderate load-following. If you run it purely for peak management, guess what? The £ per MWh figure required to recover the fixed costs increases dramatically…

Lol plan A would be all nuclear, the renewables are just to appease the rest

A full nuclear solution isn’t the ‘magic wand’ solution either…nuclear tends to operate best at base load (a relatively flat output 24/7/365). Although I understand that the next generation of nuclears, commissioning from 2024/25 will have some flexibility but not in any way appropriate for the extremes of UK national demand.

Comparing the UK to the US doesn’t help – their operational models differ dramatically to the UK and their seasonal demand trends do not compare well to the UK either.

UK Winter Peak tends to be 52-55GW (52000MW-55000MW). UK Summer minimum demand has got as low as 17GW/18GW in the last couple of years due to a combination of recession, energy efficiency and the amount of embedded generation i.e. local wind / solar PV reducing demand (from National Grids perspective).

By the end of the decade National Grid forecast ‘summer lows’ to trough somewhere nearer to 5GW at certain times of the day as the amount of distributed generation continues to increase …

…this will cause significant grid-operational issues as (a) one day could look extremely different to the next as weather (and therefore renewable generation output) changes, meaning grid will still need conventional, despatchable generation, connected and available ‘in their back pockets’ and (b) the MW demand may be significantly less than the ‘must run’ generation MW i.e. on a sunny breezy day we may have 10/15GW of Solar PV, a similar amount of wind and 10/12GW of base load nuclear…too much generation – requiring novel solutions to rebalance the equation.