Wind and solar are 30-50% cheaper than we thought, admits UK government

The cost of those grid storage and fall back power plants, like gas, will soon need to be included in the cost of wind power to make the comparisons fair. If we say £100/MWh for Nuclear then thats it. But with wind we're saying £57/MWh... but we also need to spend extra on storage that'll give a 24 hour buffer which'll bring it up to £77MWh, and then keep gas plants in operation and on standby all the time for when a 24 hour buffer isn't enough and to refill the buffer which'll bring up the total to similar to Nuclear.

There's also that we need to have capacity well over 100% for a renewable based grid so theres enough left over to store for the moments where output is low due to low wind/sun.

Renewables is still clearly the way to go but I'm just saying theres more to it than £54/MWh. We need to also stop getting ripped off with big national projects too. Like the Nuclear deal is massively higher than any other one on the planet with a price that increases yearly, HS2 is costing signifigantly more than any other railway on the planet, even some motorway projects like a new roundabout of all things cost us £50 million sometimes.

/r/unitedkingdom Thread Parent Link - carbonbrief.org