Nuclear vs Renewables

I've recently quickly perused the CCC's blog post on nuclear vs renewables. A few things strike me:

1) Fascinating to see how close the CCC's scenario is to one I produced when working up some background information at the start of WWF's PowerSwitch campaign. Needless to say WWF wouldn't contemplate a scenario with nuclear in it so I had to excise it from my final report. Just goes to show that power generation technology hasn't moved on a lot in the last 8 years (You wouldn't expect it to, really).

2) The CCC uses discount rates of 7.5% and 10% in its charts for all technologies. I guess that it's reasonable to assume that all the various options included in the CCC scenarios will be mature by 2030 and therefore a single discount rate is applicable. When I was undertaking this kind of analysis we tended to use technology (and project) specific discount rates better to reflect the actual risks associated with the particular scheme under investigation.

3) The CCC uses costs derived from a report by Mott Macdonald (the CCC blog link, above, will link you through to this report). I've downloaded it but not read it yet (it's fat!). However, just from the CCC charts I'm struck by the wide range of uncertainty. For example, all at 10%, solar PV is estimated to be between 11.0 and 25.0 p/kWh (2010 prices); wave power is 15.5 to 31.5; and unabated gas is 5.0 to 14.0. I'm guessing that the big spread in the last of these is down to uncertainty in the gas price. It makes the cost estimates for nuclear (5.0 to 10.0 p/kWh) look staggeringly certain.