🇬🇧THE GREAT BRITISH SMR-OFF🇬🇧

The competition to find the world’s best SMR yet is ON with the Brits announcing their shortlist of 6 candidates from around the world. But more importantly, what does Angelica think about it?

Let’s see the contestants🧐

🧵 🇺🇸AP-300 by Westinghouse🇺🇸

Or should we be flying the 🇨🇦 flag? In any case, Westinghouse is talking up the AP-300 as the AP-1000’s little brother.

😻shared supply chain, proven components
🧐what’s making it cheaper if you use AP-1000 components in a smaller reactor?

CYANIDE AND LOAD-SHEDDING

If you ever get cynical or complacent about the state of the grid in your country, South Africa is a grim reminder that it can always get worse. They have 8 stages of load shedding. Stage 6 meaning 10hrs in the dark.

It wasn’t always like this…

🧵 Once upon a time, the state-run electrical utility Eskom was held up as a paragon. As late as 2002, it won an award as the world’s best power company. But the downward spiral wasn’t far behind.

The load-shedding begin in 2008 and continued ever since.

THE TURBINE WARS

Offshore wind is a curious business. Everywhere you look, deals are getting done, ambitious targets are getting set...and companies are losing money.

Revenues up...but so are losses. How can this be?

🧵

reuters.com/business/energ… This is a 4MW onshore turbine. Turbine makers like Vestas and Siemens Gamesa gave been making it for years and now the supply chain is perfection. They've mastered everything about making these.

COAL IN THE AGE OF THE ENERGY TRANSITION

There’s no fuel more spurned and despised. We’re trying to leave coal behind. Yet 2022 was a record year for for global consumption.

Let’s learn more about the fuel we love to hate, but can’t seem to quit.

🧵 Coal is graded by energy content from the lustrous high-purity anthracite, through bituminous, sub-bituminous and finally lignite, the lowest grade brown coal. Any worse than that and you’re burning peat.

“The problem is everybody wants to build a Gigafactory but nobody wants to mine.”

Just had a verrrrrry interesting convo off the record with a banking person with a technical background in mining...

🧵 The problem is banks, especially European banks, don’t want to take the “reputational risk” of being involved in mining projects.

You can get “green loans” for gigafactories, but not for the other side of the supply chain.

Norwegian developer Equinor’s 1GW floating wind farm is shelved, in part due to “technology availability.” Translation: they didn’t have their floating foundations figured out. This is a problem we are going to keep seeing with floating offshore wind.

🧵
equinor.com/news/20230522-… There are hundreds of designs for floating offshore wind foundations, which is another way to say industry has yet to come to a consensus about what actually works.

Or rather, what’s going to price-down enough to make their projects economically viable.

🤑DECODING DEDOLLARIZATION🤑

In our lifetimes, the US dollar has always been the reserve currency of the world. But it seems every few years anxiety about the USD being toppled as the global denomination of choice rears its head

We are going thru one of those moments...

🧵 As things stand, the Euro is the distant number 2 when it comes to the amount of business done around the world.

But most of the anxiety coalesces around the number 3 currency, despite the fact that it's even farther behind: the Chinese Renminbi.

businessinsider.com/dedollarizatio…

People are asking whether the AP300 SMR by is late to the party.

TL;DR I think not. The AP1000 is obviously going places and can take the lil brother along. But let’s take this opportunity to do an SMR roundup.

Just my opinions…the SMR field not as thick as you think…

🧵 ⚡️The BWRX-300 by GE-Hitachi⚡️

The closest thing we have to a sure thing. Unexotic design. Experienced company. Great partners.

A great sign for success is the customers OPG, TVA and Synthos are pooling resources to mature the design, lessening First-of-a-kind (FOAK) risk.

What makes a car a product and a traditional nuclear power plant a project? If it's not made in a factory under controlled conditions, then it's not a product.

And that's a problem, argues @kirstygogan and Eric Ingersoll of @TerraPraxis.

🧵 @TerraPraxis is a non-profit putting that principle, which a lot of us in the nuclear sphere know well, into practice. The reason? We need a LOT of nuclear if we want to reach out climate goals. Like, we need it in BULK.

The incredible ambition: 700GW a year.

Time to talk cross border collaboration to advance deployment! This is how we can standardize designs, share costs and create international supply chains!

#smr2023 🇺🇲🤝🇨🇦

🇺🇲 We compared our licensing processes, evolved into collaboration between TVA, OPG on the BWRX-300.

🇨🇦 The outcome are published and demonstration how NRC and CNSC can leverage off each other.

Really looking forward to this...the international deployment panel! How do we get more countries to adopt nuclear energy? Jonathan Cobb of World Nuclear Association: "if you get approval for a plane usually you can fly everywhere...there needs to be more commonality and streamlining." Regulator are working together...but more please!

Today Taiwan say goodbye to the 2nd reactor of the #2 Nuclear Power Plant, also known as Guosheng. The 985MW BWR from GE has served Taiwan well for 40 years. But for politics, it could have served for 40 more.

What a tragedy…but also, a farce.🧵 “Taiwan is not lacking in electricity” is the eternal mantra of the government. Why, then, are manufacturers being ‘voluntold’ to reduce production to save on power on a regular basis?

https://twitter.com/yenfanglu/status/1635281402337058825?s=20

🇩🇪🟰🤑❓

We all think of Germany as the Richie Rich of Europe, but kinda arrogant and sanctimonious. And what with that sweet European welfare state model, life must be good for the Germans right?

You have no idea how wrong, and you’ll never guess why…🧵 Look at the mean household income. Yo. 🇩🇪 families are not just below 🇫🇷🇧🇪🇦🇹, but even 🇪🇸 and 🇮🇹. What’s going on?

BUT WAIT, it gets worse.

I got to catch up with a grid expert in Taiwan to do due-diligence work today for a 1,044MW offshore wind farm project. He praised Taipower to the skies when it comes to grid connection. I was surprised because in TW we’re constantly gaslit from outside that Taipower sucks.🧵 “It’s an engineer’s dream,” he said. Unlike in Australia, where the power producers, the grid companies and the retailers are all separate entities, resulting in a lot of vagueness and finger pointing, Taipower is in charge of everything when it comes to allocating grid capacity.

How Charles Munger can explain why your grid sucks. Specifically, his famous quote:

“Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the results.“

What do power plant owners want? They want high clearing prices. “The clearing prices get high when the grid is teetering on the edge of not being reliable, and even old and expensive plants are being run,” explains @MeredithAngwin in a blistering presentation to the NH Nuclear Study Commission.

We hear it all the time: Gas can load-follow. But I think what we don’t hear about as much is the price of that flexibility. I asked a former plant manager of a Combine Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plant about exactly happens when a CCGT plant “backs up” renewables…🧵 First of all CCGT plants are some of the most efficient power plants in the world, with the latest technology “exceeding 60% thermal efficiency.” However, that performance becomes suboptimal when the plant operates at part-load to counter the intermittency of wind and solar.

We’re going to see more of this: DPP legislator Chen Hsiu-pao just expressed curiosity about SMRs, asking Taiwan’s top nuclear regulator in a public forum what the possibilities are. I can’t believe the power of the SMR concept to get people to think again. However I’ll take it. Atomic Energy Council Minister Hsieh Shou-shing replied that nuclear waste is still the most pressing problem and SMRs will still make nuclear waste.

A lot of ppl are big mad at me for being anti-EU when I am pro-EU but think the Euro was a mistake. Short version: they didn't think thru the implications of monetary union without fiscal union. Long version...I read this book. 🧵 "The Eurozone was flawed at birth," said Stiglitz. If you accept the premise that monetary policy is a useful at all, then it would stand to reason that giving up control of that tool to a foreign entity might be risky. This might not be so bad for a bunch of similar economies...

"In our excitement for Net Zero we've forgotten about security, affordability and reliability." I sat down with energy consultant @KathrynPorter26 to unpack what went wrong globally and what the UK govt should do specifically. This will be an epic 🧵 First of all, let me tell you, the situation here is dire for individuals and small businesses. A friend with a decent job actually told me he would take off to work from Spain for the winter to avoid the bills if it weren't for his cat.

Had an incredible convo in a Soho basement with a young man who thought we shouldn't build nuclear power plants because we should use the money to plant trees. 🧵 Incredibly, he used South Africa as a MODEL...they just switch off the grid at times and "people just get used to it." He also (correctly) said that any new nuclear project would not come to fruition until the 2030s.

How Tsai reimagined Taiwan: When ppl think of Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen, it tends to be in relation with how she has cannily navigated the international landscape with her knack for creative diplomacy. What’s lesser known is her track record for political jujitsu at home.🧵 Elected in 2016, Tsai faced brutal midterm elections in 2018. Not only did KMT dominate up and down the country and her polls plummet, Tsai was facing internal pressure from the DPP to step down and let (current Veep) Lai Ching-te step in. Needless to stay, she survive…