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Any investor / economist will tell you that making bets that fail is not the main point, knowing then to quit is. If these numbers are correct, any rational party to the deal should just walk away from these sunk cost. Any further incurred cost is a loss. Negotiate what you want to change the burden of the incurred cost, but walk away.

Think about what the papers would print: "Nuclear plant construction abandoned after 10 billion spent on it. With this money we could have built 20 hospitals.". It would be a PR disaster way bigger than sending them a few billions more.

Hinckley won't be renegotiated, it's more a question of whether we commission the other new nuclear plants. It’s possible that Hinckley could go bankrupt though, and then the government would have to decide what to do.

It is supposed to include decommissioning and waste management costs in that £92.50. I'd bet high that there'll be significant taxpayer funded overrun on that. In 2012 that price was comparing against offshore wind strike price of roughly £150/MWh. It was predicted to reach parity mid or late 2020s. Oh dear.

I'm more struck by the link in the middle of the piece to "£100m fund aims to boost UK wind power". Wonder what they could have achieved with Hinkley's £22.5bn.

Does the price for wind power include the cost of storing that power for when it is actually required including the losses in the process?

That's what the gas plants are for.

No, the cost of a combined gas-wind system would be something like £60/MWh, so that’s what you should be comparing to the nuclear cost, not the £40/MWh directly.

You need to think of wind as a combined wind and gas system, you use wind when it's available because it has a very low marginal cost, and then use gas when it isn't. Luckily capital costs for building gas plants are low, and marginal costs for buying the fuel are high. That means it isn't expensive to build plants as backup, which are only going to be used part of the time. You can use the fuel savings to pay for the capital cost of building the wind farms, and end up without significant extra expenditure, or even saving money. The same can also apply to solar.

It's more difficult if the backup is coal, though, there the balance is more towards capital cost, not marginal cost, so there is a much less leeway to defray fuel costs using renewables.

As we're building out so much offshore wind now, I have to wonder how much Dinorwig style pumped storage the cost of Hinkley C could have got us. Dinorwig was 10TWh for £400m in 1984, and had "only" taken ten years to build. No clue at all what that might cost now as it'll undoubtedly be far beyond simple inflation.

If we're serious about climate, we have to reduce use of gas too.

There aren’t many places in the UK suitable for pumped storage, I seem to remember Dinorwig was one of only two suitable sites identified.

Generally a hybrid of energy solutions gives the best possibility of sustained development, though you're right to point to the difference in average cost. Possible though that you're conflating an average wind price with a specific nuclear price? That's apples and oranges. Compare the London offshore array (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Array) cost per MWh directly to the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...).

Lastly, note the borrowing rate for the nuclear plant was extremely high. That would certainly have been part of the problem in financial expenditures.

" According to December 2017 estimates, Hinkley is being built for £20.3bn by 2025, to be paid over a 35 year period.[10] According to Dieter Helm, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, "Hinkley Point C would have been roughly half the cost if the government had been borrowing the money to build it at 2%, rather than EDF's cost of capital, which was 9%." "

Why is EDF paying 9%, is that a recognition of the risk of failure?

It was clear when HPC was given the go-ahead that it would be expensive, and that renewabales would rapidly overtake (ok, undertake) it in energy cost very soon. So I'd like to know what Ms. May was thinking when she approved it. She must have been given some plausible reason(s) to proceed based on long term estimations of something, what were they? Reliable base supply maybe? But what else?

>Such a system will make it difficult to get above a certain percentage of renewables because of the need for gas backup

What a lot of people miss is that wind can be overprovisioned thus reducing the instances where it undergenerates.

To a certain extent, the problem is low wind conditions can occur over very large areas, so the overprovisioning has to include plants built far away from one another with long distance interconnectors. Overprovisioning is more relevant for seasonal variations in solar in my opinion.

92.50 GBP in 2012 pounds -- it's higher now.

The costs of old model reactors are high because the designs are the result of layering modern safety technology and practices on top of 1950s and 1960s era technology.

No one should be building any more of the older designs at this point, period.

The US also needs to revise the regulations governing reactor construction, because they're also centered around the old technology. The construction and operation of reactors was a very easy target for expanded regulation for many years from any politician who wanted to exploit the public's fear of nuclear, so reactors are very over regulated.

With newer/safer reactor designs and revised regulations to govern them, construction will be considerably cheaper.

However, there's no comparison between Solar/Wind and nuclear anyway, because they serve different needs, base load vs. peak load.

These numbers are misleading, because wind energy is highly volatile and often goes to waste if unbuffered, which is often the case, because buffering is expensive.

Case in point, wind energy makes up 17% of production in Germany, whereas nuclear makes up only 11%. However, wind energy only accounts for 3% of consumption, whereas nuclear accounts for 6%.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

I think you've misread that.

Nuclear is 6% of primary power consumption, not electricity consumption.

The reduction in both nuclear and renewables is presumably because the other sources are burnt, losing a great deal of energy as heat during conversion to electricity. (Nuclear also loses heat but I don't think anyone keeps track of the initial heat output as it's not a very useful number).

> I think you've misread that.

I don't think so.

> Nuclear is 6% of primary power consumption, not electricity consumption.

I'm aware of that, but wind energy and nuclear energy almost exclusively account for electricity, that's why it's fair comparison.

> The reduction in both nuclear and renewables is presumably because the other sources are burnt, losing a great deal of energy as heat during conversion to electricity. (Nuclear also loses heat but I don't think anyone keeps track of the initial heat output as it's not a very useful number).

No, the relative share here is different because energy consumption also includes vehicle fuel and heating, not just electricity. That doesn't really change the relation between nuclear and wind, however.

I'm still a bit dubious.

It's not clear how curtailed wind and solar is being accounted for here (does it count as "produced" in the first place?)

Or is the curtailment only being calculated for the Primary power chart? Seems odd that solar would reduce so much more than wind unless that is the case. Yet the curtailment rates of those are both low enough that they can't explain this difference.

Possibly the primary chart is using capacity factor for solar and wind? That would roughly explain the greater shrinking of solar compared with wind, but would basically be meaningless (as generally putting renewables on a primary power chart is).

I don't think the curtailment rates of German wind and solar support your contention so I still think you're incorrect.

A graph further up suggests that renewables together comprise a slightly higher share of consumption than production (37% to 34%) which doesn't match up with the primary power chart.

I don't know whether curtailment is factored in, but I don't see how any of this makes a difference to my point. Either way, wind energy is worse than advertised, relative to nuclear.