Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

GreatApe

Coastalwatch wrote: »

Had a quick look at the National Grid live status earlier today. It was showing 46.8% being delivered by renewables with Wind even outstripping Nuclear. Around 11pm this evening Renewables were generating 37% of our requirements and Wind being the largest single source. Sadly Coal was still in use, delvering about 5%. Perhaps they are taking the opportunity to disippate the pollution while the wind is blowing!:)

There could be grid issues which limit what can be dispatched. People seem to have the idea that any power station in the country can send power to any user anywhere in the country but that is not true. We are more like little islands with some interconnection. Even France uses some gas and coal even though they have a lot of spare nuclear capacity most the time the reason is they dont have the local grid infrastructure in place to export the nuclear to the regions of France that need the gas/coal fired output when they need it.

The good news for us is a lot of our old infrastructure is near the sea so we can place offshore wind farms near the old infrastructure and use the old lines to transmit the power and a lot of demand is also close to the sea. unlike the Germans who are going to need costly and slow and unwanted grid lines to move offshore wind south 500km

GreatApe

Coastalwatch wrote: »

Had a quick look at the National Grid live status earlier today. It was showing 46.8% being delivered by renewables with Wind even outstripping Nuclear. Around 11pm this evening Renewables were generating 37% of our requirements and Wind being the largest single source. Sadly Coal was still in use, delvering about 5%. Perhaps they are taking the opportunity to disippate the pollution while the wind is blowing!:)

It is even better than that

Coal is 1.3GW and CCGT 4.25GW right now and combined they are producing some 23% of needs the other 77% is from non fossils

This however brings up the next problem the UK will face which is that beyond about 5GW more offshore wind we will be saturated at some points with wind/nuclear and will have to curtail either/both but that will only be a small percentage of total output so no big worry for a while

Also another reason to have new homes electric only & no NG. They can add to winter demand when the wind blows hard especially with smart electric tanks.

Martyn1981

JKenH wrote: »

It’s all getting a bit personal on this thread so I think I will bow out. I know that’s what forums are like. It’s a risk everyone takes when putting forward an opinion. GW is an emotive issue, AGW even more so (and I accept that the very fact that I have just made that distinction may see even more flack fired in my direction).

I don’t set out to cause offence or belittle anyone and certainly would apologise if my comments came across to anybody like that. I may put forward an alternative point of view and, given that this is a “green and ethical” forum, that may offend some people’s sensibilities. I will make my point and usually then leave it there. Prolonged exchanges on forums frequently degenerate in civility so in my view are best avoided.

I won’t take any of the recent comments made to heart or take offence; I am just leaving it here for now.

But, going back to my first response, "whilst you are entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts". The science is sorted and solid. The only dispute left is the attempt (mainly by big oil) to claim that science is split on the issue, when it's not. Even their own science from the 80's & 90's confirmed AGW and its coming severity ..... but they chose to state the opposite in public.

Also I think you may be a victim of timing, as the world is starting to push back against 'alternative facts' due to Trump, so science denial is like 'so last year'.

Martyn1981

It's great to see that the subsidies so many countries launched a decade or so back, are now leading to cheaper renewables that are starting to compete even against the cost of cheap FF's before externalities are included.

China Seeks To Achieve “Grid Price Parity” For Wind & Solar

Martyn1981

As per the headline - big news:

This Is Huge! Marubeni Shifts From Coal To Renewables

The company had plans to build more than 13 GW of new coal generating stations but those plans have now gone into the dumpster. Instead, Marubeni will double its investment in renewable energy from 10% of its energy portfolio to 20%. It is collaborating with Jinko Solar on the largest solar power plant in the Middle East — a 1.17 GW solar farm in Abu Dhabi.

Martyn1981

Labour has some nice plans for UK RE. The article and graphs are slightly confusing me as they include nuclear but don't specify plans, but I'll take a guess:

Labour wants green energy to power most UK homes by 2030

Looking at the second graph "Labour envisages 85% of electricity coming from renewable and low-carbon sources by 2030"

it shows 50% today, which reflects the current 30% RE + 20% nuclear.

The 2025 figure presumably(?) includes all existing nuclear plus HPC (+7%), so RE growing to 43% (70% - 27%). Though I strongly doubt HPC will be operational in 2025.

The Labour 2030 target is 85% which must contain HPC, and at a guess, also contains all existing old nuclear, but some will be close to end of life, so I'll guess at 60% RE.

If I'm anywhere close with my guesses, then Labour propose growing RE from 30% today, to 60% in 2030. Nice. Also, I'd say not difficult given the rate of off-shore wind installs, and Labour's plans to get on-shore wind and PV moving again too.

michaels

GreatApe wrote: »

Will it even be necessary?

As you install more and more PV the price will be lowest when solar is highest so the EVs will likely almost all opt to charge during the max sunshine hours

In the UK if we have 35 million cars using 4MWh / yr that is close to 380GWh of storage top up needed daily. Say the cars charge during the peak 8 hours of sunshine in the peak summer days that equals close to 50GW for 8 hours the cars will be able to soak up

Not all solar panel output correlates 100% say 80% and that gives you ability to add 60GW of solar without any additional storage, just using EV fleet top up add int he maybe around 40GW the grid can handle now and you have room for 100GW PV in the UK without needed any additional stationary storage

Allow a small amount of vehicle to grid output and you can up that figure to 150GW of solar PV which could take PV to an annual 25% of electricity needs (including transport)

150GW PV + 100GW offshore wind and allow upto 10% export&curtailment and you get towards 95% wind/PV and 5% imports or gas fired

EVs solve so much of the problem
Offshore wind (or rather high CF wind be it onshore or offshore) also solves so much
Wind + EVs might even allow a lot of seasonal heating to be solved.

The next thing to discuss maybe in around 10 years time is when to ban gas boilers.
That would be quite a rapid transisition as some ~2 million homes each year need to replace their boilers.

Maybe start regulating all new builds to be electric only some time in the early 2020s with the better insulation they should be good candidates also less losses and more efficient system overall. I would probably do it asap maybe start for 2020 all new builds electric only no NG and with some solar if the local grid connection is not strong enough for solar on all builds in the development then have the solar feed the hot water tanks

One of the good things about france is their nukes actually do more than electric they also do a lot of heating for the french which is one of the reasons they use less NG (even when you account for the NG burnt in uk power stations the french use a lot less NG becuase more of their homes and factories and businesses are electric heated rather than NG)

Thanks for your thoughts. I was more wondering whether storage will ever become economic to deal with the still, cloudy winter RE troughs rather than needing to keep back up fossil fuel plants on line that only run for shorter and shorter periods?

GreatApe

michaels wrote: »

Thanks for your thoughts. I was more wondering whether storage will ever become economic to deal with the still, cloudy winter RE troughs rather than needing to keep back up fossil fuel plants on line that only run for shorter and shorter periods?

It is not possible to have seasonal stationary battery storage because the amount of energy needed for storage is beyond comprehension. With EVs weekly winter demand will be in the region of 10TWh.

You either need almost the whole 10TWh as storage (or say 8TWh) to tide you over a low output week or you need 60GW of backup CCGTs

60GW of brand new CCGTs will cost you about $60 billion while 8TWh of storage will cost you about $800 billion so a huge difference.

Also the CCGTs provide indefinite backup while the batteries in this example offer just one week of backup. If you wanted two weeks of security you are looking at closer to $60 billion vs $1.6 trillion

You would need batteries to go towards $10/KWh but that is not possible because the demand from EV vehicles will keep prices well above that and then the huge demand for daily battery storage for solar farms.

The good news is that most the CCGTs needed for the UK already exist and the additional ones we will need are not needed for quite some time and even when we do have to build new ones CCGTs are cheap and OCGTs even cheaper still

zeupater

michaels wrote: »

Thanks for your thoughts. I was more wondering whether storage will ever become economic to deal with the still, cloudy winter RE troughs rather than needing to keep back up fossil fuel plants on line that only run for shorter and shorter periods?

Hi

But take care with the figures & speculation that result in the postulations as there seems to be long history of manipulation & guesswork as opposed employing a supportable approach ...Start at the basic assumptions, apply what you know to be the case and work from there!

On the RE/storage front, that's where the government really need to pull their socks up and sharpen their pencils .... in order to reduce reliance on backup FF plant the UK needs to add schedule-able RE generation, so tidal becomes essential & above that someone needs to stop worrying about the potential 'anti' fall-out from beginning to plan for a national scale strategic store of pumped hydro (think Dinorwig scale generating plant with many times the volume of stored water) - at some time a number of select valleys will need to be flooded despite the inevitable protests else (cheap) FF standby plant will be around for the foreseeable future!

HTH
Z

GreatApe

The main aim should be to get towards 50GW of offshore wind by 2040 which should provide ~200TWh annually which can be achieved with ~2GW/Yr installed. There is no real need to worry about storage until that point we may get some curtailment but not a huge amount

If EVs take off then offshore wind capacity can be increased towards 70GW without the need to worry much about storage.

70GW PV & 70GW offshore wind by 2050 should allow somewhere in the region of 340TWh of annual electricity production which would be close to 70% powered by wind/solar for both electricity & transport. The remainder would be imports (mostly green) and CCGTs and hopefully no mass biomass burning