[ RadSafe ] Wind and Nuclear Capital Costs

[Muckerheide, Jim (CDA)]

Hi Al,

The answer is #2. :-)  Wind generally gets 20-25% capacity factors.  In fact, wind power designs do not try to optimize on capacity factor. In general, smaller turbines would achieve higher capacity factors for a given site.  But larger turbines produce more kWh by capturing more wind in the high operating speed wind conditions, which optimizes $/kWh.  But it is also pretty clear that $2500/home would not be economic (and few/none would be built) without the 1.8 cents/kWh taxpayer subsidy.

OTOH, it looks like nuclear plants will be $2000++ in capital costs (vs. earlier prelim cost estimates of ~$1200 for Nth-of-a-kind plants).  Of course, unlike our arguments of the past, nuclear plants will only be built with significant subsidies of their own, including a limited 1.8 cents/kWh subssidy. 

But nuclear plants continue to have excessive design requirements and overheads (one informed commenter claimed a few months ago that regulatory-driven costs would be as much as 80% of construction costs).  But current increases are mostly due to escalating materials and labor costs as detailed planning progresses.

Regards, Jim


-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl on behalf of alanpeg at sbcglobal.net
Sent: Sat 2/17/2007 11:33 AM
To: Radsafe
Subject: [ RadSafe ] Wind and Nuclear Capital Costs
 
I am puzzled by some figures in Sandy's newsclip of 15 Feb. According to the story, FPL has spent nearly $1 billion to install wind-farm capacity of 1600 MW for almost 400,000 homes. This amounts to a capital cost of $2,500 per home and a capacity of 4 kW per home. As I understand it, a nuclear reactor costs $1,000 to $2,000/kW (depending on who you ask) and serves 750,000 homes. This amounts to a capacity of 1.3 kW per home and a cost of $1,300 to $2,600 per home. I can think of two possible explanations for the discrepency in capacity:

(1) The news article is in error
(2) Wind needs higher peak capacity because it is intermittent.

Thanks for any comments.

Al Rosenfield
Columbus Ohio