More fuzzy math from The Breakthrough Institute

The nuclear deniers and climate luke-warmers at The Breakthrough Insitute are once again damning solar energy (and their favorite target, Germany) through fuzzy math and factual omissions, something at which they excel. In the Wall Street Journal - which you can't access unless you subscribe - on their own website and on a rather dodgy website called The Energy Collective, articles have appeared that suggest the embattled and unfinished Finnish reactor at Olkiluoto will generate electricity that is four times cheaper than Germany's solar energy.

(We call The Energy Collective "dodgy" because it boasts that it features "the world's best thinkers on energy and climate" which is grandiose enough to doubt right away. In reality it appears to be a convenient front for climate deniers, oil companies, The Breakthrough Institute and others whose agenda is to bash renewables and efficiency in favor of fracking, nuclear etc. It features articles that rely on out of date numbers and "studies" funded by the notorious Koch brothers. And it is funded by Siemens and Shell among others.)

But while Trembath et al. of the Breakthrough bunch argue that "proponents of Germany's Energiewende … argue that solar and wind can make up the difference in lost [nuclear] capacity" that's not actually the goal. Germans are switching to wind, solar, and biomass, and they do not believe a switch to renewables will work unless they drastically lower their consumption. Energiewende's Craig Morris looked atTrembath's fuzzy math.  Read on:

While I poured over his math for nuclear, I could not help but wonder, however, why he bothered. We already know what a kilowatt-hour of new nuclear will have to cost for EDF to build a new plant in the UK: around 9.5 pence per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly 0.114 euros or closer to 0.15 dollars – so the French firm is asking the British government for more than twice as much as Mr. Trembath says nuclear power in Finland will cost.

Trembath says his "findings challenge the idea that solar photovoltaic is a disruptive… technology," but by the end of this decade solar and wind power will be pushing heavily into the baseload, thereby forcing these plans to ramp down – something nuclear does not do. www.energy transition.de

The two new reactors planned for Hinkley Point C in the UK will have a total capacity of 3,200 MW at a price tag of 14 billion pounds, or around 22 billion dollars. Olkiluoto will have only half of that capacity (1,600 MW) but apparently cost 15 billion dollars, putting the cost of a MW in Britain at only 73 percent of the cost in Finland. So according to his math, the British should only be paying 73 percent of half of what the Finns will pay – not the 15 cents being discussed, and not the seven cents in Finland, but 73% of seven, or around 5.13 cents.

But back to solar in Germany – as my colleague Felix Matthes tweeted yesterday, the cost of solar is plummeting. Trembath takes figures from 2000-2011 for solar and compares them to future theoretical estimates for a new plant not yet in operation. At present, though, the feed-in tariffs for newly installed arrays in Germany are dropping by 1.8 percentage points per month. On June 1, the highest price will be 0.15 euros for the smallest rooftop arrays, with the lowest price dropping to 0.104 euros – equivalent to a range of 0.19-0.13 USD.

The first new solar arrays in Germany are thus already cheaper than what EDF is asking for to build new nuclear in the UK. That price for nuclear will be locked in for decades, whereas solar keeps getting less expensive.

Of course, at a monthly reduction of 1.8 percent, it will take the smallest solar arrays some time before they cost only 0.15 USD (EDF's offer for Hinckley). An entire year, in fact – in June 2014, the most expensive feed-in tariffs for new PV arrays in Germany will cost 14.75 US cents (11.71 euro cents) at current reduction rates. Who knows what solar will cost seven or eight years from now, when Hinckley Point C is finished?

Finally, the first feed-in tariffs for solar built years ago will expire after 20 years next decade, so we will have solar at less than 10 cents per kilowatt-hour replacing decades-old solar at 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. By 2030, lots of really cheap solar will have replaced the old expensive stuff in Germany, but if you build a nuclear plant now, you will be stuck with it (at 15 cents per kWh) until mid-century. Nuclear does not ramp down well, so it is not compatible with intermittent wind and solar. If you are waiting until solar gets cheap to build it, you need to get rid of nuclear now.