Game to Cut CO₂ Emissions

Energymixer.uk offers a game where you can play to produce the cheapest clean power for the UK.

Above you see an example of me “winning” the game summer 2020 Energy challenge. I pulled off producing zero CO₂ emissions for two weeks straight with varying weather pattern while keeping all the lights on.

The challenge in this game is to try to achieve this while keeping costs per MWh of electric power produced down to a minimum. In this case I managed to keep the cost at £78/MWh. For comparison, if I ran on only gas power the cost would have been £42/MWh with a 46GW capacity.

Nuclear power while having no CO₂ emissions more that gas. E.g. in this game building 14GW capacity of nuclear will cover 32% of electricity demand at a cost of £20/MWh.

12GW of gas power will cover 31% of electricity demand at a cost of £13/MWh. So in this game Nuclear power is about 50% more expensive than gas.

Renewable power in contrast is really cheap. If we spend as much as £20/MWh on wind power we get 43% of our electricity demand covered. If we use solar power we get 37% covered.

The problem with renewable energy of course it that it doesn’t produce power exactly when you need it. That is what this game allows you to experiment with…