Is the Government being honest about the cost of energy?

rogerblack

spgsc531 wrote: »

I quoted official figures of total generation and provided simple maths to show your post as full of garbage.

The huh? clearly failed on you.

The official figures of generation are of total installed peak capacity.

This will only be reached on a midsummer day, when the whole country is cloudless, for perhaps an hour or two.

You cannot assume that this is the average capacity, for calculations, because of:
A) Night.
Clouds
C) Location
D) Panels not oriented perfectly.

A, B and C alone mean that in the UK, you are lucky to get about a tenth of the peak figure, as an average.

Saying solar is good value in this case - when only looking at the figures for midday in a cloudless august is perhaps missing something.

spgsc531

rogerblack wrote: »

The official figures of generation are of total installed peak capacity.

This will only be reached on a midsummer day, when the whole country is cloudless, for perhaps an hour or two.

You cannot assume that this is the average capacity, for calculations, because of:
A) Night.
Clouds
C) Location
D) Panels not oriented perfectly.

A, B and C alone mean that in the UK, you are lucky to get about a tenth of the peak figure, as an average.

Saying solar is good value in this case - when only looking at the figures for midday in a cloudless august is perhaps missing something.

How on Earth can you fail to understand the difference between total generation and peak capacity? Seriously..

rogerblack

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

In the meantime there have been developments that (1) reduce the amount of silver and aluminium in the panels for structural and electrical reasons, which point up at the sun, it is now underneath. (2) The undersides have been "silvered" to reflect the energy that gets through the panel back onto the cells. (3) The range of wavelengths of "sunlight" that can be captured and converted to electricity has been extended.

There is no significant silver in PV panels.

Conventional as-installed solar cells are not transparent, and reflecting light from the back makes no sense.
Siemens(?) do have a production panel which is designed to make use of illumination from the back - I believe this will be made by double sided cells of more or less the conventional sort.
This needs to be raised off a reflective white roof, and can get a useful 'free' boost this way.

Making them use less aluminium and glass can have robustness issues unless care is taken.

Be careful about reading too much into popular articles on solar panels.
All too often, you'll find if you dig into 'Solar panel works even at night' (for example), you find the rather more modest original article which says it can use a little bit more infrared than normal panels, and someone has assumed it can use thermal energy from the night sky (it can't).

And then if the headline is true, the panel technology is coming along in 5 years.

Many technologies over the past decade or three have been announced as breakthroughs in solar cells.
However, through simple cost reduction and manufacturing improvement, the vast majority of solar panels installed remain more-or-less the same as those available in the 1980s.
Monocrystalline or polycrystalline silicon, a substantial fraction of a milimeter thick, assembled onto glass.
There are indeed many innovations on this, from production efficiencies, tighter control of process, to anti-reflection coatings.
But, fundamentally, most panels today are exactly the same technology as panels in the 80s, just made lots cheaper by volume.
None of the alternatives that have had massive investment in has really taken off to nearly the same degree, simply as they've been able to reduce the cost of panels faster than new technologies.

Look, for example at Nanosolar - they were promising $1/W panels, at a time when the industry was at $6ish.
They had problems hitting that cost - and even now if they did, it'd be less relevant, as the delivered cost of panels is under $.90

rogerblack

spgsc531 wrote: »

How on Earth can you fail to understand the difference between total generation and peak capacity? Seriously..

I would ask the same question.

https://restats.decc.gov.uk/cms/national-renewables-statistics/ (page 135, for 2011)

Nuclear 68980Gwh
Solar 252Gwh. (page 188)

Originally Posted by spgsc531

Nuclear 16.6% of total generation 2011
Solar PV 0.64% of total generation 2011

Those figures are installed capacities - solar was 1/25th the installed capacity.
The generation however was 250/70000, or 1/280th the total electricity output over the year.

spgsc531

rogerblack wrote: »

I would ask the same question.

https://restats.decc.gov.uk/cms/national-renewables-statistics/ (page 135, for 2011)

Nuclear 68980Gwh
Solar 252Gwh. (page 188)

Originally Posted by spgsc531


Those figures are installed capacities - solar was 1/25th the installed capacity.
The generation however was 250/70000, or 1/280th the total electricity output over the year.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/65841/7345-elec-gen-2008-2011-et-article.pdf

Page 51.

That is a table of generation NOT installed capacity

Martyn1981

Ok guys, can we take a breather.

There are two ways to look at the subsidy:

1. Total costs, where nuclear is far greater, but nuclear also generates far more.

2. Cost per unit, where PV was far higher, but is probably about level now.

So as Roger says, we should take total generation into account when considering total costs. And as spgsc531 points out, there are other issues to be considered too.

Personally I think we are all in agreement, just looking from different angles. What I think is important, is that a 'relatively' small investment of high FITs levels, has already led to 'relatively' good PV FITs levels, which appear to still have considerable room for further drops.

Hopefully within the next year or so, we'll be able to measure the success of this scheme. A year ago, I'd have said we'd need another 5 years, but the progress last year was quite shocking.

PV FIT is now FAT again, so I expect it to undercut both nuclear and off-shore wind before long. Not a bad investment compared to long term nuclear subsidies, but the proof is always in the pudding, and for that we will need a large roll out of PV at low subsidy levels (compared to nuclear) in order to keep diluting the initial investment.

As an aside, does anyone know if there is a good estimate of PV generation for 2012. I know that we had about 600MW of installed domestic PV at the start of 2012, so approx 500GWh's is the starting point, but a huge amount more was installed in early 2012, which would have generated most of a years average too? I've got 800GWh's in my head, but I'm not sure where I saw that.

Mart.

grahamc2003

spgsc531 wrote: »

How on Earth can you fail to understand the difference between total generation and peak capacity? Seriously..

There's no such thing as 'peak capacity' in the esi.

Since you have just made it up, could you tell us what it is?

spgsc531

grahamc2003 wrote: »

There's no such thing as 'peak capacity' in the esi.

Since you have just made it up, could you tell us what it is?

Try reading the thread...

Then ask rogerblack.

He first said 'peak powers' in post 24

You'll then notice I said 'Huh?' in response in post 25

Then he mentioned 'total installed peak capacity' and 'peak figure' in post 32

grahamc2003 wrote: »

There's no such thing as 'peak capacity' in the esi.

Since you have just made it up, could you tell us what it is?

No, I did not make it up, rogerblack did.

Try asking him?

pwllbwdr

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Biomass, watching that new tv series 'The Genius of Invention', episode one was all about Drax. Near the end they mentioned that one of the 6 boilers was being converted to run on biomass rather than coal. What surprised me, and I hope I didn't mishear this, but they said that another boiler would be converted each year till 3 (of the 6) was running on biomass. That is far faster (and sooner) than I was expecting.

Mart.

Yes. Drax is using wood pellets in large quantities. They're being imported from Canada in large shiploads, unloaded on Tyneside and then railed to the power station. Transporting and storing biomass has its own issues of course - self-heating and spontaneous combustion in large bulks of the stuff can be problematic.

I don't know if Drax is using UK biomass too.

pwllbwdr

albyota wrote: »

It would be useful to get some opinions as to what we actually need / want / can afford / as to priority / cost / risk / etc...

listed below are some of the choices, please feel free to add to the list. The comments / reasons are taken from comments on different threads on MSE.

Wind = doesn't work when its not windy + NIMBY + ugly + Noisy + expensive = still need all our existing GAS, OIL, COAL power stations.
Solar PV = What in the UK, where we get very little sun, + not much use at 5.30pm in winter. = still need all our existing GAS, OIL, COAL power stations.
Tidal / barrage = .......well thats not gonna happen and yet we are completely surrounded by the sea with tides in & out every single day.
River Hydro / Pumped Storage i.e. Hydro reservoirs powered by PV & wind = needs land, costly + no investment.
Fracking = earthquakes + expensive to mine = fossil fuel = CO2
North sea Gas = dimishing resource + getting more expensive = CO2
Oil = dimishing resource + getting more expensive = CO2
LNG milford haven = at the mercy of other countries buying power + fossil fuel = CO2
Biomass / rapeseed oil = land given up to grow a fuel = cost of growing foods increases, will be warm but we'll starve.
Nuclear = clean electricity, expensive to build + expensive to clean up + NIMBY + have we learnt from chernobil and Fukishima no investment + 8 to 10 years away.

any others?

I'd keep run-of-river hydro systems and pumped storage systems separate. The former is a decent source of renewable energy, albeit rather expensive.