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Baseload Renewables? nuCLEAR news No 2 nuclear power October 2015 Nuclear power advocates cling to the idea of ‘baseload’ power like limpets, writes Michael Mariotte in The Ecologist, but the idea is obsolete. Variable renewables combined with stronger grids, energy storage and responsive demand can do a better job for less money. The old grid, beholden to massive, polluting baseload power plants, is being replaced by a nimbler, high-tech 21st century system oriented toward variable renewable energy. A grid based on smaller, distributed variable power sources can be just as reliable, and even more resilient and secure, than a grid reliant on baseload power.

Variable does not mean unreliable: as long as it can be reliably projected with sufficient advance time what the wind will do and thus how much wind power will be available where, and the same for the sun, then a variable grid can be highly reliable. And those can be and are, in fact, reliably projected. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) will be obsolete before they even exist. (1)……….

A very different vision of an electricity network was put forward at a seminar hosted by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. (5) A project called kombikraftwerk (6) based in Germany has shown how a 100% renewables system can be made to work – variable technologies like wind and solar backed up by despatchable ones such as hydro, biogas or biomass (and in the UK we could add tidal), reinforced by a variety of storage methods, with demand-side measures reducing overall demand and flattening peaks.

Steve Holliday, CEO of National Grid, the company that operates the power transmission networks in the UK and in the northeastern US, says the idea of large nuclear power stations to be used for baseload power is outdated: “The world is clearly moving towards much more distributed electricity production and towards microgrids. The pace of that development is uncertain. That depends on political decisions, regulatory incentives, consumer preferences, technological developments. But the direction is clear.” (7) ……….

Paul Dorfman, writing in The Ecologist argues, according to Ofgem any ‘generation gap’ is likely to happen before 2020 well before Hinkley could begin generation. (9) Dorfman says there is good evidence to predict that UK onshore wind and PV will be at zero operational cost by 2025, and offshore wind will have a far lower operational cost than nuclear. (10) The pro-nuclear case is that we need a balanced portfolio of power sources. But the flip side to investment in Hinkley is low investment in renewable energy generation. This is because the government Levy Control Framework imposes a strict cap on low carbon energy financed from the public purse (from levies on the bills of energy consumers). (11) And because the government will be contractually obliged to provide on-going State Aid for the incredibly long 35 year Hinkley contract, there will simply be very little money left over for renewables – as the Levy Control Framework budget will have been already consumed by nuclear. So Hinkley will crowd out investment in renewables. Greedy nuclear will have ‘eaten all the pies’ before renewables get a look in, and progress towards achieving overall targets for low-carbon renewable energy will inevitably falter. All this being so (which it is), we can see why the government has been chopping and slashing at UK renewable funding, and why there is widespread concern at the failure to consider a purposeful energy efficiency stimulus for real diversity of supply……….. http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/nuclearnews/NuClearNewsNo78.pdf