That’s right. These large state sponsored projects tend to follow a pattern whereby only a few very large companies can supply the manpower and expertise to deliver the project. Huge hydoelectric dams were like that. The defense industry is like that. Until very recently the space industry was the same with the few companies getting all the business and their costs underwritten by the taxpayer - cost plus accounting resulting in huge development costs. So it was with the nuclear power industry in the UK and France with its obvious connection to state security.
The UK spent a fortune on developing its own nuclear power plant design, the Advanced Gas Cooled reactor (AGR) and later a fast breeder reactor that created nuclear fuel for other reactors. The promise was that a technology could be developed that not only produced copious amounts of electricity but also created its own fuel. This was enormously attractive to governments.
They worked, but they needed a lot of maintenance and the economics proved to be a disappointment. They were expensive custom built designs that could not be easily manufactured. The US went in a different direction with the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) which is now the most common design. These could be a manufactured and sold on to other countries to recoup the development costs. Small PWR reactors are efficient and have lower maintenance. But…governments wanted a few big reactors and not lots of small ones. No-one wants one in their back yard and they require a lot of water and surplus heat. All the UK reactors are based on the coast. Eventually the UK decided to change to a PWR design and, of course, they had to be really big. So now we have the Hinkley Point C reactor being built at huge expense. The government is prevaricating about other sites.
Contrast this with off-shore Wind farms, which just keeps getting cheaper and neatly built on all the offshore building expertise that the UK acquired during exploitation of the North Sea Oil and Gas (with a bit of help from the Texans!). Building huge Windfarms in the North Sea is easy. Moreover the system the government has in place is to auction off areas of the North Sea to companies that are interested in developing wind farms and guarantee the first few a ‘strike price’ to cover the development costs. This ‘contract for difference’ system was developed during the North Sea Oil and Gas development and it seems to work. Each new area released seems to have a low strike price as the economies of scale kick in and the technology matures.
Everything about Nuclear is a headache except that it does have that attractive feature of supplying reliable baseload. So UK policy seems to be Wind and Nukes and gradually to turn down the Natural Gas plants. Coal has all but gone. Hydro is limited by geography, not enough suitable mountains and valleys. Some coal plants have been converted to burning biomass (wood chips from the US!). And the Interconnects to other countries. Fat cables the carry a few GigaWatts of power from other countries grids. This is a growth area. Solar…a few percent at most, this is not a country rich in sunshine.
What is missing is the big long term, grid scale battery. This is the missing invention of the 20th Century and so electricity generation became based around a design using an over provisioning of large power stations connected by a high capacity grid to distribute the power to consumers. If there was a big battery, the design would be very different. The growth of intermittent renewables such as solar and wind have upped the pressure for a solution to the grid storage problem.
Consequently the renewables power generation business faces criticism from the traditional power generators anxious to preserve their business interests and the whole thing gets politicised. Moreover, the nuclear lobby are also claiming that they can develop smaller, nuclear power plants that are much cheaper than the multi-gigawatt PWR designs. The Natural Gas industry is also fighting it corner with the ‘Blue’ Hydrogen designs and that somehow bury the carbon dioxide somewhere underground.
UK policy seems to be to hedge its bets. It is backing a lot of horses at the same time, see which one wins. But it is sold on a Green energy strategy that has wide political support.
Most European countries are having an internal debate about this, they all have a legacy of energy generation infrastructure deal with that is often quite different. France with its dependency of Nuclear and no gas network. Germany and many states in central Europe with huge coal power stations and a dependency on Russian natural gas. The politics takes on an international dimension.
The story in the US is quite different, kind of similar to China. There are huge renewable resources in some parts of the country and huge demand in others. I would have expected the US to start developing a national grid to connect the Mid-West sun and wind states with the big coastal cities where there are many consumers. But there seems to be a lot of problems with that. So maybe it will develop off-shore floating wind farms, despite the lack of convenient shallow coastal water.
The debate in Texas must be interesting, the home of the Oil and Gas business but with lots of Wind power and grid that failed dramatically. The threats and opportunities are written very large.
