Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear, by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.
Oh, that old canard.
Q: if you install X GW of wind generating plant then how much conventional plant can you remove?
A: 0 GW; nada, zilch.
You still have to have the equivalent conventional plant capacity available when wind power is unavailable, and that costs money. Self evidently, if you only have to use a plant for, say, 10% of the time, then the fixed costs make the cost per minute or GWh look extremely high. But what's the cost of not having it available when required? (Hint: much, much higher).
It depends which costs you externalise,
Just so. Most proponents of wind energy are disreputable in that they knowingly externalise
and ignore the "dispatch costs" in order to make their preferred technology look good.
Responsible engineers don't do that.
the new build nuclear reactors are going ahead with an artificially inflated and guaranteed price for the electricity they produce. A huge incentive for them to continue and makes some alternatives non-viable as they are unable to compete with those heavily subsidised contracts.
Er, that's being wilfully blind.
Wind and solar are heavily subsidised with guaranteed prices.
But in a more open market where the price freely fluctuates adding wind capacity will offset other generators, already gas peaking and hydro are used as short dispatch generators from their stored energy before we get into storage of electricity. A mixture of gas and wind is where the money has been going in Australia as its more profitable than coal. If there is storage (of some sort, be it gas as above) and fast slewing capacity in the grid then renewables can keep adding in more generation capacity, even if they can't deliver the tops of the peaks or have lulls other generators will price themselves to the market. That encourages storage and discourages slow/conventional thermal plants. Incremental adding of intermittent renewables doesn't directly offset any conventional generation but it changes the market radically, and the incumbents with their long term investments don't like that idea.
Note that in the UK electricity prices have already been
double the guaranteed strike price for the
next generation of nuke electricity.
Any control engineer will tell you the limitations of using feedback to control a system. If you have a feedback system with a loop time of decades, then your system will completely fail to control fluctuations with a period of minutes/days/weeks.
The consequences of those fluctuations would not be tolerable to an advanced society. I know; I've seen the results in the UK when I was a kid and in India as an adult.
Your argument that adding renewables won't directly substitute for the existing conventional plants is again reducing the agreement to a boring and irrelevant point,
Boring? Maybe.
Irrelevant? Absolutely not.
a large conventional coal or nuclear plant can easily be replaced by some mixture of other plants that together have a lower impact on the population. Gas alone is a good option, but if the desire is to move away from non-renewable resources then intermittent renewables in combination with some fast slewing plants will make a start in that direction.
Er, that's being wilfully blind. Neither easily nor safely.
Add enough intermittent renewables and the conventional plants will price themselves out of existence as they become less and less viable to operate. All the elements are there in the countries with effective energy markets, or if you want to take full control and dictate the entire system. But government taking these piecemeal approaches to energy policy are hampering the ability to transition away from the conventional plants.
Ah, so you knowingly ignore the externalised costs of some technologies but not others. That's not what a reputable engineer does.