Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

markin

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Yes, but .......

Stage one, is I believe batteries. Actually I suppose stage one is building out too much RE generation 'at times', but let's pretend we are getting close, and I suppose we are on very windy nights.

Intra-day battery storage has been estimated at around 500GWh for the UK (I won't bore you with old links as I assume better ones will come along soon). Now, 500GWh is a terrifyingly huge number for battery storage ..... or is it?

If the UK car fleet was replaced with 50kWh BEV's, then we'd have 1,500GWh of batts almost as a side effect. I'm guessing that at any point in time one third or more will be parked up, so if plugged into a smart charger with appropriate instructions to benefit from cheap excess, or sell at peak prices, these BEV's could meet the intra-day needs.

Perhaps cars will be replaced by a smaller number of on call BEV's, but even then there would be fleets of buses, vans, trucks etc that would, at times, be sitting idle.

So, then onto stage two, as stage one doesn't allow us to get to 100% RE as we'd still need FF gas as a back up for extreme periods, perhaps 15% or so of annual generation.

It's at this stage that methane production from excess RE for gas generation, or H2 (again from excess) for thermal plant use, or fuel cell generation, makes great sense, and this can be used to aid us in hitting 100% RE.

Also, due to the higher energy density (as Z mentioned) could potentially provide for inter seasonal storage - PV for the winter, or wind for the summer, but now I'm being greedy and leapfrogging to stage four.

At this point worth a quick reminder that for all intents and purposes, UK off-shore wind potential is virtually limitless, so enough capacity, combined with enough storage (plus of course a mix of other RE generation types), and we're sorted. Simples.

The is still plenty spare... 2017 4.5%, 3% Q1 2018 and costing 4-8 million a month. But didn't a big floating farm come online late last year so may be back up, i cant find newer numbers.


Constraint payments may be the cheapest way at only 100m a year for now Vs just one 2GW Scot-Eng line costing 50m a year for 30+years, The are 7 more longer ones in the pipe line isn't the? Maybe hydrogen would be cheaper!

31 July 2018 Constraint payments to wind farms in the United Kingdom totalled £7.12m over the weekend, 28–29 July 2018, making it the most expensive weekend to date and well above the previous record of £5.87m for 24-25 June 2017. Constraints on Saturday the 28th of July amounted to £4.41m, and on Sunday the 29th to £2.71m.
The total volume of electricity curtailed was also a UK weekend record at 81.51 GWh. That is equivalent to the annual consumption of electrical energy of about 20,000 households.
The number of grid-connected (Balancing Mechanism) wind farms receiving payments for cutting output was also a record at 56 onshore (55 in Scotland and 1 in Wales), and 13 offshore.
When wind farms are constrained, this can be a fraction of the output of which they are capable at the relevant period. Over the last weekend, however, some 67 windfarms were 100% constrained, i.e. were completely shut down, at some time period, mostly between 10pm and midnight (Settlement Periods 44-48) on Saturday night.
Interestingly, while onshore wind in Scotland continued to provide the bulk of these constraints, at 70% of the money and 81% of the energy, offshore wind in England cost the consumer £1.75m to constrain off, accounting for 25% of the UK–wide cost. English offshore wind, however, accounted for only 15% of the energy discarded, reflecting the very much higher prices paid to offshore wind due to the higher lost subsidy, though, as with onshore wind, the constraint payment prices paid actually exceed the lost income by a considerable margin.
Table 1. Onshore wind farms in receipt of constraint payments over the weekend 28–29 July, 2018. Variations in the subsidy per MWh foregone reflect the different RO bands, where older windfarms receive 1 ROC per MWh and new windfarms receive 0.9 ROC per MWh. The value of a ROC is assumed to be £50 per MWh.

https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/343-weekend-constraint-payments-record

To compound the worry over wind farms ‘being paid not to run’, the cost of curtailing wind in the UK has been increasing as capacity has grown, topping £100 million in 2017 for the first time. Although only ever imagined as a temporary issue (until the market developed suitable flexibility mechanisms to avoid wasting electricity), the seemingly unstoppable rise has attracted media attention



First highlighted by Imperial College researchers earlier in the year, curtailment costs have fallen off a cliff during 2018. This plummet follows the opening of the first part of a 2 GW HVDC link between Scotland and England, providing much-needed relief on the main bottleneck that stopped all of the power generated north of the border being transmitted south.
In the first quarter, wind curtailment in 2018 was down by around two-thirds compared with the average over recent years, a direct result of the new link allowing electricity to flow from Scottish wind turbines to demand centres further south.



Just 3% of wind generation was curtailed during January-August 2018, compared with more than 4.5% in the same period last year, data downloaded from National Grid shows.

https://eciu.net/blog/2018/wind-constraint-payments-on-the-way-down

Q3 2018

The cost of staying in balance

by - Imperial College London


Not only has the cost of generating electricity been rising, the cost of balancing the system has also hit a 10-year high. The day-to-day costs of running the transmission system, which National Grid passes on to all generators and consumers (but not to interconnectors), has doubled over the last four years.
Balancing the power system cost £3.8m per day over the quarter, adding 6% to wholesale prices. On three days this quarter, the cost of keeping the system stable exceeded £10 million per day. This daily cost has been gradually increasing since 2010, but the cost this quarter was one-sixth higher than the previous record (2017 Q3).

These balancing costs include deploying fast-responding generators for backup and reserve, and adjusting the output of generators around the country to keep the transmission system within operating limits. The growing costs highlight the importance of when and where – rather than just how much – electricity is produced and consumed. Over the quarter, there were 58 hours when managing electricity flows around the system cost more than generating the electricity in the first place.

During September, the balancing costs spiked several times when wind output was high. The chart below left shows how balancing costs increase sharply once wind farms supply more than a third of Britain’s electricity. Wind cannot be forecasted with perfect accuracy, and generation occurs far from places where electricity is consumed, causing network constraints. Both of these must be corrected using short-term dispatch of flexible sources, which incurs balancing costs.

The amount of flexible generation on the system is another key driver of the balancing cost. The chart below right shows that balancing costs rise when the output from flexible generators (gas, coal, biomass and hydro) is below 10 GW. Having a ‘brittle’ power system with limited room for manoeuvre will be expensive to control. More flexible generation, storage and demand-side response will be critical to minimising these system costs in future.

https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/reports/report-2018-q3/detail/the-cost-of-staying-in-balance?&_k=swnu1h


Western Link Outages Increase Consumer Costs for Scottish Wind Farms. 13 April 2019

https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/351-western-link-outages-increase-consumer-costs-for-scottish-wind-farms-

markin

Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees

Published on 22 Jun 2019
In Squamish, British Columbia, there’s a company that wants to stop climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHX9pmQ6m_s

buglawton

markin wrote: »

The is still plenty spare... 2017 4.5%, 3% Q1 2018 and costing 4-8 million a month. But didn't a big floating farm come online late last year so may be back up, i cant find newer numbers.

Constraint payments may be the cheapest way at only 100m a year for now Vs just one 2GW Scot-Eng line costing 50m a year for 30+years, The are 7 more longer ones in the pipe line isn't the? Maybe hydrogen would be cheaper!

https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/343-weekend-constraint-payments-record

https://eciu.net/blog/2018/wind-constraint-payments-on-the-way-down

https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/reports/report-2018-q3/detail/the-cost-of-staying-in-balance?&_k=swnu1h

Western Link Outages Increase Consumer Costs for Scottish Wind Farms. 13 April 2019

https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/351-western-link-outages-increase-consumer-costs-for-scottish-wind-farms-

Re balancing costs periodically exceeding power generation costs: This might explain the recent news item that wholesale electricity costs in the UK had turned negative at moments.

Piddles

A bit outside the two weeks, but a bit of pub trivia for you when EV range anxiety comes up:

As of yesterday, 28 May, there are 8,546 charging locations across the UK, hosting a total of 13,688 charging devices. In contrast, as of the end of April, there are currently only 8,400 petrol stations in the UK, a figure which is continuing to decline.

https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2019/05/29/range-anxiety-ev-charging-sites-now-outnumber-petrol-stations/

zeupater

Piddles wrote: »

A bit outside the two weeks, but a bit of pub trivia for you when EV range anxiety comes up:



https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2019/05/29/range-anxiety-ev-charging-sites-now-outnumber-petrol-stations/

Hi

On that very issue, Bjorn Nyland set himself a challenge a few days ago .... probably goes a long way towards putting a lot of the usual arguments to bed ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_04rk3lIFcM

HTH
Z

michaels

Piddles wrote: »

A bit outside the two weeks, but a bit of pub trivia for you when EV range anxiety comes up:



https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2019/05/29/range-anxiety-ev-charging-sites-now-outnumber-petrol-stations/

Still more petrol pumps though....

zeupater

michaels wrote: »

Still more petrol pumps though....

Hi

... Not as many as electricity meters & consumer units though!

Z

Martyn1981

michaels wrote: »

Still more petrol pumps though....

Still early days though....

Martyn1981

Well, this shocked me!

Not what is happening, but that I wasn't going to post it, as it's just the same ole same ole from the government, then I realised this is huge news (I know it's been mentioned before) and at the very least I should post it to 'rage against the machine'.

HMRC pushes steep VAT increase for new solar-battery systems

Homes hoping to shrink their carbon footprints by installing a solar-battery system face a steep VAT increase from October under new laws proposed by HMRC.

The Treasury put forward legislation on Monday to raise VAT for home solar-battery systems from 5% to 20%, on the same day that MPs are debating the government’s new net zero carbon target for 2050.

Meanwhile, home coal supplies will continue to receive the lower VAT rate.

The lower rate will also apply to the labour costs associated with installing the system while the 20% rate will be applied to the hardware only.

Hmmm?

Martyn1981

And to balance the news on RE VAT, we have:

G20 nations triple coal power subsidies despite climate crisis

China and India give the biggest subsidies to coal, with Japan third, followed by South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia and the US. While the UK frequently runs its own electricity grid without any coal power at all, a parliamentary report in June criticised the billions of pounds used to help to build fossil fuel power plants overseas.