The cost of wind power in the UK

The UK Government plans around 33GW of wind power in the next few years, to meet commitments they plan to undertake to the EU, and seem to intend signing up to be liable for vast sums if they do not hit it.
Neither conservation nor nuclear energy would count towards this target, although they would greatly reduce CO2 emissions.

So, how much will this program cost, and could the money be better spent?
I will use the Governments own figures to take a look at this, and then go on to consider how much it would reduce CO2 emissions.
Here is a link to the DTI figures, which were compiled in 2006:
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As can be seen here, on-shore wind costs are estimated at £0.9millions per MW installed, off-shore at £1.6million in 2006, rising to £1.75million in 2011 before falling to £1.28million in 2020.
Somewhat arbitrarily I have selected a value of £1.4millions per MW as being a very fair median cost to place on the build.
This comes out to a total cost of £42.9bn for the total fleet.

This includes some estimation for connection for the off-shore farms, but does not include all the costs for new connections to where the power would actually be used, as many of the sites would be remote.
I doubt that final figures have even been estimated closely for this, as the precise sites have not been chosen, but I have seen figures of around £10billion bandied around.
I will however base my case on a very low figure of £2.1billion, to round our cost out nicely to £45bn.

Please note though that if you chose the highest figures for build, at £1.75 per MW, and £10bn for connection, you come out to £67.75bn - and in my experience first estimates often go up, rarely down.

Now we come to the killer for wind energy: you don't get the full rated power, as the wind does not blow all the time.

Government figures show that current off-shore wind farms get just under £30% utilisation, not an awful lot more than on-shore, as most current sites are close to land and all plans are for sites to remain close, to reduce connection costs and make maintenance easier, so higher figures for wind resources further out to sea do not come into play.

So you only get around 10GW of actual energy flow for your money, not the installed 33GW, and you get that when the wind happens to blow, not necessarily when you need it.

However, since the cost is all up-front, when the wind is blowing you had better make sure you use it, or the costs are even higher - so what you have is a kind of intermittent base load, having to be brought on-line when it is available, and you have to shut something else down if that is in the middle of the summer when loads are low, so if you are using nuclear for base-load, as I will argue is the best option, you increase costs for both.

You would really have to be using coal or gas for most of your base-load, so effectively you have locked in use of these, and fossil fuel emissions.

Although you don't have to back-up wind at 100%, substantial back-up is needed, or alternatively you could build a much larger grid, to spread variability as the wind is usually blowing somewhere.

Suggestions for this involve transmitting power as DC, as losses are lower, so in addition to the lines you need inverters, which cost money.
Alternatively you could seek to store more power, which is OK for hours, but if you have a quiet week is not really practical.
All of these measures will doubtless be used in some combination, but for the purposes of the analysis here it should just be noted that they will all just add extra cost to the already high costs we have arrived at.
We don't need to take them into account to see how impractical the wind option is.

As an aside, lets look at how much it would cost if we could somehow magically find the space to put them all on land.
At £0.9million a megawatt, you come out to a smidgen under £30bn, and w e can be more definitive about connection costs here, as most of the windiest areas of Britain such as the North of Scotland are some way from major centres of population.

The £10bn connection estimate might be reasonable here, so your costs might be around £40bn - note that this is not actually going to be built, and there are no proposals to build that much on land, aside from the way the Scots might feel about covering vast areas of the landscape with wind turbines to provide power to the English, or about driving transmission lines through areas like the Cairngorms National Park.

How much would this program reduce CO2 emissions?
The short answer is, not a lot.
Here is some information from Europe, where Denmark and Germany have a lot of wind power installed, and France and Sweden not a lot, but do have a lot of nuclear power, and in the case of Sweden, hydroelectric:

“Germany has spent billions of euros subsidising wind and solar, marching to the greens’ drum. They have not succeeded in reducing their CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, which remain among the highest per capita in Europe [10.4 tonnes/capita/ year, up from 9.5 in 2,000. That is because wind and solar are intermittent and unreliable. Every solar panel and every wind machine must be backed up by reliable power for when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing,” he said.

Moore said Sweden had the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in Europe (6.3 tonnes/capita/year) and France had the second lowest (6.8 tonnes/ person/year). Sweden is 50% hydroelectric and 50% nuclear. France is 80% nuclear, 10% hydroelectric and uses only 10% fossil fuel. Denmark has the highest CO2 per capita at 11.0 tonnes/capita/year “because their mix is 18% wind and 82% fossil fuel. It is clear to see that the more hydroelectric and nuclear in the mix the lower the carbon emissions will be. Wind has a minor role to play and solar is not even worth the investment,” said Moore.

The man behind the nuclear power shift - Times Online

Although I think Moore has overstated his case, and you don't need one to one back up for wind power, the conclusion is plain.

At any level of wind power we are projecting, it avoids little CO2 emissions, to move to higher levels of wind power production, you would have to build giant grids, increase storage or fossil-fuel back up.

All that would cost big money, in addition to our already high cost projections.

My conclusions are likely robust for most areas of the world, although some areas of the States might be more favourably placed, with good wind resources and plenty of places to put turbines on land, although I would not bet on it's chances without very heavy subsidy.

We have come to the conclusion that getting about 10GW worth of power from wind off-shore in the UK would cost about £45bn, using very favourable estimates and leaving aside many of the additional costs such as back-up.

In later blogs I will consider whether solar power does any better in the UK and northern latitudes, and then see how well we do for reducing CO2 using my preferred option of conservation followed by nuclear build.