The article quotes £147/MWh for CCGTs. These look to come from the Electricity Generation Costs 2025 [0] released on the same day as the CfD results. However there is no £147/MWh in Annex A [1]. There is a £145/MWh for CCGT delivered in 2030, but the way this was arrived at is interesting.
a) A load factor of 30% (which seems pretty low for a CCGT), that is actually ~28% (per Annex A [1] "Technical Costs and Assumptions" sheet);
b) fuel efficiency is set to be 54%, which is far lower than BAT CCGT of around 64%, which affects fuel and CO2 emissions costs;
c) the analysis missed out capacity market payments that one gets for having dispatchable power stations;
d) the analysis presumes £41/MWh of carbon costs.
The key drivers of the price are load factor (so amortised construction costs), conversion efficiency (fuel costs and carbon costs) and carbon costs themselves. These make up 90% of the LCOE.
Heating from gas is quite peaky (morning and evening heating cycles), whereas heat pumps are best when run low-and-steady.
Assuming 2/3 of residential heat demand transitions to heat pumps, and assuming an optimistic COP of 3 in the worst weather (highest flow temperatures, lowest air temperatures ... perhaps more like 2.5), then the power required to heat this fraction of houses is 2/3 / 3 = 2/9 of the mean gas demand. [0] linked report figure 1 shows a (smoothed by eyeball) demand of around 140GW "local gas demand" during the Beast from the East. This implies heat pumps would take over 31GW to power, which is more like 60% of the current UK electricity supply.
Sorry, alignment issue! Probably transport is less troublesome as it has a decent element of demand side response to it (batteries sufficiently large for a couple of days without charging).
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The workers' compensation claims that have been recognized by labor authorities include six cases of workers who developed cancer or leukemia due to radiation exposure
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So compensation has been requested for cancers, of which one death has been reported.
It’s a distant memory from my radiography training, but solid cancers generally take longer to appear post radiation exposure (compared to eg leukaemia), and that case seems early. The article claims that you can’t get lung cancer from a nuclear accident. I’m not sure why they say that, it seems a bold claim.
Whatever the case, they paid out the compensation.
There is no cancer that can be attributed to a particular radiation source. Population rates of cancer might change, but at an individual level, you can’t prove a thing.
From the perspective of the power plant, that’s lucky.
It's not about being lucky. The dose was too low to make a measurable impact. And the effects can't happen this past as we have data about impact of heavy radiation after JP bombing.
So what we have is an industry with extremely low death rate impact that some countries put a stop on, like jp in the past or banned, like Germany, all while industries that caused more deaths like coal generation or even hydro are still used. And other branhces that do vastly more damage like smoking and alcohol are legalized. To me this is sad
I would posit that they hope Wright's Law will take hold; the components can be optimised and the deployment standardised. Also it looks as if most of the stuff can be made within the US or EU, dodging tariffs.
Transmission in this sense does not include distribution losses (by the DNOs, at lower voltages). 8% in your link.
The UK government is now touting datacentre sites with better access to the national grid (transmission network) to avoid the issues inherent in the distribution networks. E.g. Culham which had a grid connection to power the JET fusion experiments.
> There should be more incentive to build data centers in the north
There are clustering advantages for data centres. Lower inter-cluster latency being key. I do not think the UK market is large enough for two hubs, really.
a) A load factor of 30% (which seems pretty low for a CCGT), that is actually ~28% (per Annex A [1] "Technical Costs and Assumptions" sheet);
b) fuel efficiency is set to be 54%, which is far lower than BAT CCGT of around 64%, which affects fuel and CO2 emissions costs;
c) the analysis missed out capacity market payments that one gets for having dispatchable power stations;
d) the analysis presumes £41/MWh of carbon costs.
The key drivers of the price are load factor (so amortised construction costs), conversion efficiency (fuel costs and carbon costs) and carbon costs themselves. These make up 90% of the LCOE.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-gener... [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6967b0c806fab...
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