Does anyone here have an ideological objection to Solar?

doughnutmachine

grahamc2003 wrote: »

Edit - before your recent 'contributions' some of us were about to start discussing small scale Nuclear power. It would be interesting is those sensible posters could carry on discussing it, and not get diverted by your inane and incorrect comments.

the Royal Navy use small nuclear reactors to power submarines, i've been told they are the size of a washing machine. the US navy use nuclear to power their aircraft carriers, an aircraft carrier is about 100,000 tonnes. so the reactor must deliver a fair amount of power.

doughnutmachine

i had a look at the national grid website for electricity imports/ exports to the UK from europe. from july-nov the uk was more or less always importing electricty from continental europe. so additional solar in the UK is unlikely to mean conventional UK powerstations doing nothing.

i suppose if more solar in the uk helps reduce imports it has to be a good thing. it means that in the summer more electricity can be supplied to southern europe to reduce the fossil fuels they are burning.

i type of expect it would take someone doing a Phd thesis to work out the optimum way to distribute renewable energy generation in europe..... though i still think solar power should be concentrated in spain/ greece etc.

maybe as a first step towards a green electricity network solar is ok. the next steps should hopefully be a smart grid to reduce electricity demand at peak times, then hopefully a way of storing electricity (maybe electric cars?).

zeupater

doughnutmachine wrote: »

.... maybe as a first step towards a green electricity network solar is ok. the next steps should hopefully be a smart grid to reduce electricity demand at peak times, then hopefully a way of storing electricity (maybe electric cars?).

Hi

Smartgrids are at first a great idea, then, if you are blessed with an independent mind and apply a couple of logical & typical scenarios, you start to think ......

Take now for example .... it's the mid winter and we have visitors ... we've recently had a meal which was cooked by electricity, but now we only have five low energy lights & a hifi on and that's it for the non-baseload energy consumption, so what's possible to save from non-essential baseload management with a smartgrid apart from the fridge & freezer ? - absolutely nothing. Is this a problem now, probably not because smartgrid management would see this as a low-load period and therefore allowing the fridge & freezer to run according to their own thermostatic cooling demand requirements, but we probably cooked our meal and had hot drinks afterwards at around the same time as the average household and that would be a time when, if the fridge & freezer were running at the same time they would only be consuming less than 10% of the household load ... which in real terms is pretty insignificant when you consider that domestic energy doesn't form the only source of instantaneous power demand .... yes it's a technique for smoothing demand a little, but it's not the great panacea which many claim - it's actually very likely that smartmetering is simply a ploy to introduce HHM (Half Hourly Metering) and therefore bill peak demand energy supply at a punitive rate in order to increase supplier profit margins ....

I agree that energy storage is key, however, although there are a number of technologies for energy efficient storage being developed, the only really practible & cost effective technology in current use is pumped hydro - and country folk tend to get a little upset when city dwellers tell them that they are going to flood their valleys so that they can light their billboards, streetlights and houses when the sun isn't shining and the air is calm.

As for using the batteries in cars as a national power reserve shared resource .... if I had an electric vehicle, it would be charged overnight, driven to a destination in the morning & then driven back late afternoon. At peak demand times the vehicle would therefore either be away from the charging point, or in a poor state of charge awaiting overnight recharging ... what could the batteries actually provide if they were already in a low state of charge ? ..... no, if I spent £30k of my money on an electric motor powered by very expensive & limited lifecycle batteries, then I'm pretty sure that the guy down the road isn't going to be powering his 55" plasma TV at my expense and I'm certain that I'd rather have the batteries in a state of charge which meant that I'd be able to make any return journey, whether planned or unplanned, without the undue anxiety resulting from watching the charge status and estimated remaining-range displays .....

HTH
Z

zeupater

doughnutmachine wrote: »

the Royal Navy use small nuclear reactors to power submarines, i've been told they are the size of a washing machine. the US navy use nuclear to power their aircraft carriers, an aircraft carrier is about 100,000 tonnes. so the reactor must deliver a fair amount of power.

Hi

The issue is that both Royal Navy submarines and US Nimitz class aircraft carriers are pretty well guarded whereever thay are in the world - as are the relatively small number of large centralised reactors in this and other countries .... the reason for this being the potential for misuse by various 'unfriendly' factions.

Consider what the situation would be if each household had a gas boiler sized nuclear powerplant packed with fissile material .... or the nearest electricity substation or telephone exchange building was converted into a district-provision nuclear powerplant ..... just think of the security headaches, maintenance schedules and decommissioning issues this would cause ....

Regarding the size of the reactors in Nimitz class aircraft carriers. They are are slightly larger than a 'washing machine' - the ships have two reactors, each of which would easily fill an average UK three-bedroomed house, and they only produce the heat to drive the steam turbines which are considerably larger .... all ultimately protected by a total of around 6000 crewmembers ...

HTH
Z

zeupater

grahamc2003 wrote: »

Not sure why you think single household Nuclear is impractical. Plenty of people are walking around with a Nuclear plant in their bodies keeping their hearts beating correctly - the longest having been working for about 25 years and still going strong with no maintenance. Afaiaa, the recipient still has a single head. There are probably few engineering problems in scaling it up to provide a constant 1kW. Just one thousand of those and you could either close, or not rebuild, a coal/oil fired powerstation. Something you can't do no matter if every roof was covered in solar panels, and every bit of countryside littered with windmills.

There have been plenty of proposals for small Nuclear stations for neighbourhood scale electricity. Of course, there's no way they'll ever get built in the forseeable future - we'll have to wait for several blackouts with the prospects of more before people will come around to thinking they may be a good idea, especially for those with windmills in their garden and a roof full of solar panels perplexed as to why they are getting the powercuts when they have done everything the greens have asked of them.

Don't confuse impracticality with (current) political unacceptability.

Hi,

If no-one minds, I'll attempt to inject a little perspective into this part of the discussion ....

Leaving aside issues such as economies of scale, let's just consider the investment, on a current-cost basis ... and let's work on comparing the generation to a typical single 4kWp pv array at maximum output .... just for fun, and there is a reason why we shouldn't compare to a powerstation (of any kind !!) ...

A typical pacemaker would likely be power rated at ~0.00001W (10uW) and cost ~£2000 .... so, to match a single 4kWp pv system the expenditure would be around £800billion, or ~50% of current UK annual GDP .... if economies of scale and technical developments resulted in a halving of costs in each and every year for the next 27 years, the cost of a 4kW system would be roughly in line with a current 4kWp pv array ....

I think that it's pretty obvious why a powerstation wasn't used for comparison - there simply isn't enough funding in the world to compare with one small gas-turbine.... .... maybe the FiT payable against pv arrays would be far more preferable to even the most vehemently anti-pv/anti-FiT members amongst us, considering the potential alternative technology being proposed ....

In jest, but in perspective .....

HTH
Z

Martyn1981

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

I agree that energy storage is key, however, although there are a number of technologies for energy efficient storage being developed, the only really practible & cost effective technology in current use is pumped hydro - and country folk tend to get a little upset when city dwellers tell them that they are going to flood their valleys so that they can light their billboards, streetlights and houses when the sun isn't shining and the air is calm.

HTH
Z

Hiya Zeup, just for info, here's an article on underground pumped hydro. It is theoretical and expensive (150% of 'regular' pumped hydro), but I found it very interesteing:

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/04/23/drill-baby-drill-can-store-gigawatts-of-renewable-energy/

Also regarding storage and PV, something I've mentioned before, but until PV becomes much larger, storage isn't really an issue. The critics here, keep mentioning winter peaks, but ignore the fact that leccy demand is always high when PV is generating. So PV's specific role, pretty much avoids additional storage costs - leaving (perhaps unfairly) that problem and cost to other technologies.

Recent report by DECC doesn't envisage any storage issues for PV until we reach 22GW (if?), and then only during mid-day on a sunny Sunday in June:

http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/consultation/ro-banding/7335-national-grid-solar-pv-briefing-note-for-decc.pdf

Personally I'd challenge that 10GW of domestic figure. That sounds more like 20% of domestic properties (possibly the maximum suitable) not 10%, and all running at max (same weather, same orientation, same pitch), and no change to leccy demand ie shifting washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer (etc) use from other parts of the day! Still interesting, regardless of my concerns. Maybe the solution is compulsory hot water storage - that'll make a few people happy!

Mart.

Martyn1981

On a general note, and to address all these questions about PV, what if it detracts from this, or that, or those, that nobody seems to be substantiating, or even, it works better elsewhere which seems irrelevant, just unfortunate. Why not just step back and ask 2 simple questions:

1. Can PV become an economic source of leccy in the UK within a reasonable timescale (perhaps 10 years)?

2. Does PV detract from other means?

There are other issues, like meeting peaks, or encouraging public involvement/investment, that add or subtract to the benefits. But if it does 1 without 2, then, as they say, "move along, there's nothing to see here".

Mart.

zeupater

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Hiya Zeup, just for info, here's an article on underground pumped hydro. It is theoretical and expensive (150% of 'regular' pumped hydro), but I found it very interesteing:

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/04/23/drill-baby-drill-can-store-gigawatts-of-renewable-energy/

Also regarding storage and PV, something I've mentioned before, but until PV becomes much larger, storage isn't really an issue. The critics here, keep mentioning winter peaks, but ignore the fact that leccy demand is always high when PV is generating. So PV's specific role, pretty much avoids additional storage costs - leaving (perhaps unfairly) that problem and cost to other technologies.

Recent report by DECC doesn't envisage any storage issues for PV until we reach 22GW (if?), and then only during mid-day on a sunny Sunday in June:

http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/consultation/ro-banding/7335-national-grid-solar-pv-briefing-note-for-decc.pdf

Personally I'd challenge that 10GW of domestic figure. That sounds more like 20% of domestic properties (possibly the maximum suitable) not 10%, and all running at max (same weather, same orientation, same pitch), and no change to leccy demand ie shifting washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer (etc) use from other parts of the day! Still interesting, regardless of my concerns. Maybe the solution is compulsory hot water storage - that'll make a few people happy!

Mart.

Hi

Regarding the underground pumped hydro .... there was a brief discussion about 18 months ago regarding this, but on a much larger scale .... https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/44293442#Comment_44293442

On pv capacity/storage issues .... well that's typical DECC - commission and publish a report concentrating on one particular aspect of power supply, totally disregarding the issue of other non-schedulable resources and how the aggregated impact of uncontrollable generation impacts on the requirement for storage capacity or alternative generation redundancy .... they've done it before (re: imported gas strategic reserve), and they'll do it again (& again !) .... when, oh when will the public sector stop compartmentalising and look at the wider picture ... :wall:

HTH
Z

spgsc531

Hello all

Go easy on me

With the Government forecasting 29% of electricity generation by renenwables by 2020, and 35% by 2030? surely they have taken into account future issues.

They recently published the Energy Bill, which I haven't read through but if it is an issue I would be surprised if it hasn't been thought about.

Also, aren't all homes supposed to be 'smart metered' by 2019. I would have thought this would help with any future problem.

zeupater

spgsc531 wrote: »

Hello all

Go easy on me

With the Government forecasting 29% of electricity generation by renenwables by 2020, and 35% by 2030? surely they have taken into account future issues.

They recently published the Energy Bill, which I haven't read through but if it is an issue I would be surprised if it hasn't been thought about.

Also, aren't all homes supposed to be 'smart metered' by 2019. I would have thought this would help with any future problem.

Hi Spgsc531

Welcome to the forum ...

... you would certainly have hoped so .... but I reckon that there's so much lobbying from interested groups that the average government department simply gets bamboozled ... remember, at the level which the public sector actually interfaces directly with government the positions are more likely to be filled by 'wannabe' or failed politicians renowned for the ability to talk rather than think !! ...

Regarding smartmetering .... have a quick look at my post from last night on this thread. The issue with smartmetering is that smartmeters are simply an integrated component of a smartgrid, which then requires householders to invest quite heavily in smartappliances or some form of control device .... without the appliances being in place the smartgrid demand smoothing theory simply falls apart .... remember, the majority of appliances which are being sold today which are suitable for smart-control (fridge, freezer etc) will still be in daily use in 15-20 years time ... this just leaves HHB (Half Hourly Billing) at peak demand times to discourage consumers from using energy through a visual or audible alarm signal, the question would then revolve around how many would simply ignore the warnings and continue to use energy at a peak-time punitive tariff .... who gains ? ... yes, it's the suppliers that have been lobbying for smartmetering under the currently 'in-vogue' guise of protecting the world from 'climate change' .... if only the relevant government departments and our 'political elite' had the ability to 'think' as well as 'talk' this would have been considered ....

HTH
Z