In my opinion: £75,000 to boil a kettle? This costing is clearly nonsense
Thanks to Dr Phillip Bratby's letter (February 18) I am now fully aware of why the British economy is doomed to failure, there is absolutely no understanding of calculating costs.
I would blame these incredibly poor maths skills on the continued lack of decent education in this country, but I suspect that the good doctor knows he is being deliberately deceptive. When he states that it would cost £75,000 to boil a kettle using a 50kw Endurance Wind Power turbine, he neglects to mention that it would be continuous boiling for the next 25 years, or 219,000 hours of boiling, to rack up this cost.
Either Dr Bratby's understanding of economics is appalling or he intended to be deliberately dishonest. The average 3MW production, estimated by Dr Bratby, from the total installed turbines would occur throughout the 25-year life expectancy of the turbines, the capital cost would therefore not be depreciated over the first hour of operation; or even more extreme, as Dr Phillip Bratby claims over the first kettle to be boiled.
It would be like claiming the Hinkley Point C Nuclear reactor's 1600MW peak output with cost of construction of £12.5bn when run at capacity will boil 530,000 kettles for £23,534.91 each. it would be even worse if we factored in the fact that between 2007 and 2011 nuclear ran 40% below capacity making a £39,308.18 cost to boil a kettle using new nuclear reactors. The cost is even before we've considered acquiring any uranium for the reactor, which unlike wind does not come cheap. This way of costing is clearly nonsense.
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I call on Dr Bratby to take GCSE Accounting if he honestly believes what he says, then save the rest of us having to waste energy putting him straight. There is nothing to be gained for the community at large in misrepresenting the true costs of any forms of energy. If people care about solving fuel poverty we must strike to accurately measure costs of energy generation, this is not done by making ridiculous claims. The important calculation that Dr Phillip Bratby could have done was to calculate the cost of generating a unit of energy, a kilowatt hour, for the 50kw Endurance Wind Power.
Using the estimates he provided this works out at a little over 11.41 pence per unit.this compares reasonably wit the current standard tariff of EDF, which is 15.19 pence per unit.
If Dr Bratby wishes me to explain to him how to calculate costs for energy and indeed the difference between energy and power, I am more than happy to do so. Neither the mathematics nor the physics of the problem should present a problem for any school child in the country, and I am certain that Dr Phillip Bratby can at least equal their ability.
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