Thanks for the very useful article, interesting that the capacity factor has kept on declining which is a very inefficient way of using resources. These plants can last for 20 years and with £800 mm capital cost and 80% load factors possible, can generate close to 130-140 twh over the useful life. Capital cost of only £5-6 per mwh. If we try to explore fracking potential; maybe we can have US level gas prices which would mean only around $20 per mwh or around £15-16 in unit gas costs. Overall, gas plants with ensuing high load factors can be much cheaper overall than offshore wind. Not to mention that the network investments needs would be way lesser. Further to think, we have 30gw + of capacity, these existing plants themselves can generate 200twh + or around 2/3rd of our energy needs.
Interesting, especially as someone involved from the early days of CCGT’s and who worked on the transmission infrastructure for some sites I would have expected some sites to be extreme outliers, in particular the Powergen site at Killingholme & the Enron site at Teesside.
Would you be prepared to disclose the sites in your dataset?
Thats very interesting - neither of those two sites made it into my data set - generally my data skews to later sites, probably due to the survivorship bias of starting with a sample of still existing plants - but yes, probably rational to expect some large outliers with any big infrastructure projects - and probably also higher costs when there is a big rush for capacity (which might be the case going forwards from here)
Good question - for now I prefer to keep the data as blobs on a chart - no good reason other than I'm more interested in general trends than making firm claims about specific assets (and inviting all the commentary that it might attract!)
In terms of running costs and all CCGT fleet wouldn't be incurring the scale of balancing costs we now see with a mixed generation fleet. A big chunk of that cost is going to the CCGT operators to ramp up to compensate for managing the huge constraint problem the grid now has particularly across the whole of Scotland. The farce here is that the windfarms can bid at virtually nil cost to secure generation rights whilst the CCGT operators sit there waiting for the ramp call. Also many of them have long ramp up times and also minimum on times for around 6hrs. Thus we've constructed a wholly inefficient system that is saving some CO2 but indirectly releasing more / MWh. Im also not sure how much they are having to use the gas/diesel peakers these days but they procure plenty of it for slow reserve every day.
Thanks for the very useful article, interesting that the capacity factor has kept on declining which is a very inefficient way of using resources. These plants can last for 20 years and with £800 mm capital cost and 80% load factors possible, can generate close to 130-140 twh over the useful life. Capital cost of only £5-6 per mwh. If we try to explore fracking potential; maybe we can have US level gas prices which would mean only around $20 per mwh or around £15-16 in unit gas costs. Overall, gas plants with ensuing high load factors can be much cheaper overall than offshore wind. Not to mention that the network investments needs would be way lesser. Further to think, we have 30gw + of capacity, these existing plants themselves can generate 200twh + or around 2/3rd of our energy needs.
Interesting, especially as someone involved from the early days of CCGT’s and who worked on the transmission infrastructure for some sites I would have expected some sites to be extreme outliers, in particular the Powergen site at Killingholme & the Enron site at Teesside.
Would you be prepared to disclose the sites in your dataset?
Thats very interesting - neither of those two sites made it into my data set - generally my data skews to later sites, probably due to the survivorship bias of starting with a sample of still existing plants - but yes, probably rational to expect some large outliers with any big infrastructure projects - and probably also higher costs when there is a big rush for capacity (which might be the case going forwards from here)
Good question - for now I prefer to keep the data as blobs on a chart - no good reason other than I'm more interested in general trends than making firm claims about specific assets (and inviting all the commentary that it might attract!)
In terms of running costs and all CCGT fleet wouldn't be incurring the scale of balancing costs we now see with a mixed generation fleet. A big chunk of that cost is going to the CCGT operators to ramp up to compensate for managing the huge constraint problem the grid now has particularly across the whole of Scotland. The farce here is that the windfarms can bid at virtually nil cost to secure generation rights whilst the CCGT operators sit there waiting for the ramp call. Also many of them have long ramp up times and also minimum on times for around 6hrs. Thus we've constructed a wholly inefficient system that is saving some CO2 but indirectly releasing more / MWh. Im also not sure how much they are having to use the gas/diesel peakers these days but they procure plenty of it for slow reserve every day.