6037

It’s paywalled for me so I can’t read the article, but how many wind turbines are we talking about here? You need enough space and the right location for them and then you still have the problem of it not being able to provide consistent baseline power generation.

6038

Which is arguably an even bigger issue with nuclear. There’s wind power everywhere, yet no-one wants a nuclear power plant in their county / state / continent it seems. Agreed on baseline power, though offshore and energy storage are becoming steadily cheaper (not a full solution by any means).

6039

There’s quite a lot of space in the North Sea.

6040

Canada just released a new process for assessing impacts of major projects that are considered nationally significant. These are large projects (such as a new highway over 75km long) with significant potential for environmental impact. Previously, the proponent would have to demonstrate that environmental and social impacts were minimized and mitigated or compensated. Now, the requirement is for proponents to demonstrate that the project is a net public benefit. It’s a significant change to the philosophy of whether projects should get approved or not.

This could be climate-good as new international pipelines, refineries, and oil sands mines are going to be harder to gain approval. Unfortunately, nuclear power plants are also on the list, as are uranium mining operations and uranium processing operations.

6041

Well this at least sounds good.

6042

This isn’t accurate.

Last week, prices for new wind power delivered by 2025 were set at prices as low as £40 per megawatt hour. By comparison, power from Hinkley Point C is expected to cost £92.50 per megawatt hour.

So it’s projecting the nuclear power to cost twice as much as wind power. But that cost per megawatt hour for wind is the cost for that capacity. Wind power of a given capacity, does not always actually PRODUCE that much power. It’s merely the maximum that it can produce, in ideal circumstances.

It’s not really valid to compare this directly to nuclear capacity, because nuclear can actually produce its Max capacity at all times.

For wind to match nuclear capacity, you need to have a significantly higher Max capacity, plus a storage mechanism, so that when it’s windy you can produce enough power to meet demand, plus enough extra power to store, so that you have backup power to cover demand when there’s no wind.

6043

The article doesn’t really make clear the details of that calculation, but all global studies that compare the Levelized Cost of Energy across generation sources do not simply list the capacity. That would make it all meaningless! A “capacity factor” is applied that is based on typical utilisation ranges. For instance, the EIA apply a factor of 41-45% on wind (nuclear has a factor of 90%).

This is true for a 100% consistent apples-to-apples comparison, but the comparisons that show that wind is significantly cheaper than nuclear already takes into account the much higher capacity by using a capacity factor that I mentioned above. The remaining distinction is intermittent vs. baseload, which would need to include storage as you mentioned.

6044

Absolutely right. But the gap in price is growing on both ends. Nuclear keeps going up, wind keeps going down; down by 30% in the last two years for offshore. Maybe that £52.50 and rising price gap per megawatt-hour is starting to make energy storage worthwhile.

Here is a link I just searched which shows lithium battery storage (grid scale) has dropped to $187 per megawatt hour, still more than nuclear, but not that much more.

6045

Ah, well that certainly makes the number dramatically more comparable, but still, until you include the storage cost too (which some calculations do), then you aren’t correctly comparing the costs.

That being said, I’m surprised that when applying a factor of 45% to the capacity, that wind is still that cheap. I do not believe generation costs have dropped that low that even when needing to produce twice the capacity to match nuclear, that it’s still half the price.

6046

Is there good reason to believe that approval would be harder? On the face of it “net public benefit” seems a lot easier to fudge in favour of a project than “environmental and social impacts are minimised/mitigated/compensated”. You can, in principle, say, yeah, these species will go extinct, but hey we’ll get 500MW of power, and we think that’s a net positive. You don’t even have to bother with any mitigation. Is there a detailed framework for making the net benefit assessment and how are the downsides weighted? The paper goes into a fair amount of detail on what projects would be covered, but very little on the assessment itself, as far as I can see.

6047
6048

Right, it’s not clear from the file but basically a federal assessment is an order of magnitude more detailed than an assessment for municipal projects, which would be say when a City wants to widen a road. For an example on level of detail, look at the following link which deals with gender analysis.

https://www.canada.ca/en/impact-assessment-agency/services/policy-guidance/practitioners-guide-impact-assessment-act/gender-based-analysis.html

You can imagine a similar level of scrutiny for hundreds or thousands of potential impacts. It’s actually a good system in many ways (though I haven’t had time to really digest or even see the implications of these new rules, and my projects are smaller than this federal level). Here is a sustainability guideline excerpt:

https://www.canada.ca/en/impact-assessment-agency/services/policy-guidance/practitioners-guide-impact-assessment-act/interim-guidance.html

As a hypothetical example, if a lake were identified as a key VC by an Indigenous group, the practitioner would then describe the interconnectedness of the lake with other VCs in the system including fish and fish habitat, human health, social security, equal opportunity, equity, and traditional harvesting. The practitioner also would describe the relationship between the lake system and other systems, such as a system describing the impacts to air quality. Air pollution could have adverse impacts on the lake including impacts to fish, health (as it relates to drinking water), and potentially lead to the loss of the recreational use of the lake.

Good system but businesses likely continue the complaint that Canada is ‘uninvestable’.

6049

On the good news front:

Progress!

6050

Worth noting that they are considering nuclear to be a renewable.

6051

Really? Does “renewable” just mean “not fossil fuel” in their categorization scheme?

6052

Ya.
Basically, any carbon neutral thing.

6053

We can renew our uranium supplies simply by arranging for a local supernova. Easy peasy.

6054

I’m not sure I care for labeling nuclear renewable, but hey a carbon tax accelerated things it seems. If only we could managed to do that.

6055

I’m curious, is there a good proposal for a carbon tax out there anywhere? One that explains how it works, where and how the tax is applied, etc.

6056

This is an explanation for how the Canadian federal tax works in Ontario: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/climate-change/pricing-pollution-how-it-will-work/ontario.html

Main points:

A charge applied to fossil fuels, generally paid by registered distributors (fuel producers and distributors), as set out in the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act

Under the proposed approach, most of the proceeds the federal government collects from Ontario through the fuel charge will be returned directly to Ontario’s individuals and families through Climate Action Incentive Payments