Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

GreatApe

Coastalwatch wrote: »

Is that why they are inviting Jo public to contribute up front for Sizewell C to supposedly assist in lowering the cost of the leccy it subsequently produces.:eek:
Do they think we were born yesterday!:mad:
Surely Sizewell C must be even less likely to go ahead now than even Hinckley Point!:beer:

The UK simply does not need additional new nuclear power stations primarily because we will soon have 70% nuclear power in the grid some times anyways (night time summer demand 20GW Vs 6.5GW domestic nuclear and 7.4GW French imports which means during the summer nights the UK grid could be as much as 70% nuclear.

Even with a windless summer night the UK could be not far from 85% non fossil due to the 70% domestic and imported nuclear plus another 15% domestic and imported hydropower and on windy nights perhaps 100% non fossil

zeupater

NigeWick wrote: »

I'd take that now and RUN AWAY!

Hi

Run Away?? - no way! .... methinks it's time to seek the intervention of Brother Maynard and stand firm ....

Z

GreatApe

zeupater wrote: »

Hi All

Had another thought related to a UK example after posting that yesterday which provides support to the scale of likely costs ...

The Thames Tideway project is based around a ~7m diameter pipeline (ambient temperature low/no pressure) running 16miles & costing around £5billion on a current cost basis ... so around £300million/mile ...

Also had a couple of thoughts related to individual existing property connections ...

A couple of years back a friend installed a heat-main connection between a couple of buildings using a twin core pipe, the materials were pretty expensive (around £50/metre), but being rural & having access to 'free' labour/equipment the installation was pretty straightforward .... park this thought for a moment, it'll be needed later ...

Quite often we hear mention of cold water supply pipes needing replacement with horrendous cost implications ... a few £thousand seems to be pretty standard ... so if we were to accept that each property could be connected to a curtilage supply point with large diameter insulated heat-main for the same cost as a small diameter water supply pipe (which is unlikely, but bear with the thought process) we have something to work with ...

Okay, ~£2k for the connection plus ~£1000 (based on 20m average) of pipework gives an approximation of the cost of property tails, so around £100billion just to get the heat from the pavement to the house ... remember, this excludes valves, control systems pressure reduction requirements, connection, smart heat meters (~£500/household?), so likely a figure closer to £200billion would give an idea of the local connection requirement ....

Right then, back to the parked thought .... the heat-main project mentioned needed to include system heat-loss within the heat-main run so as to size the heat source ... from memory the loss was calculated at around 10W/metre for the underground pipe & slightly lower for the unburied sections .... applying this to the approximation used for costs above, we get an estimated thermal loss just in the connections from properties to curtilages which is approaching the total thermal capacity of HPC, so possibly between 2&3 HPCs would be needed just to cope with these connection tail losses on a useful CHP basis .... and that's before calculating local distribution network losses & those involved in the main grid! ...

A national heat distribution infrastructure has staggering costs & staggering thermal inefficiencies, resulting in staggering costs in creating the centralised thermal plant ... that's why CHP/Co-generation is seen as being a local or district heating solution ... I've seen a few district heating solutions in operation & they seem to work well, until they go wrong for some reason that is, then the cost & blame game seem to raise temperatures elsewhere! ...

All starting to look like the pattern that governments seem to get drawn into on large projects .... costs don't seem too bad when the project idea is originally raised by a project sponsor, only to have 'unforeseen' (as if!) costs ramping up after actually committing to the plan! ....

Heat pumps sitting alongside batteries make far more sense ... a 4kW.t ASHP setup running at ~60% capacity on a 24hr basis would probably suit the majority of UK home winter heat-load requirements where insulation is at reasonable levels without impacting on peak-load generation & that's the most likely & most cost effective pathway to follow ....

... now if the heat-pump was integrated into a fuel cell co-gen design using derived bio-gas (or scrubbed air synthetic gas!) delivered through the existing gas grid, we can start to see considerable efficiency gains and a target-able solution leveraging considerable existing assets ... but that's relying on a co-ordinated approach by government, so probably more than a few years down the line! ...


HTH
Z

More nonsense from you
At least you've trashed your method of looking at train tunnel costs to guess water pipe costs :rotfl:

Really why do you object to the idea this will cost around £50 billion as that is roughly the net asset value of the current water and waste water companies and they arguably have much more difficult job as they don't just pump water they clean up water mixed with all sorts of !!!!

Regarding the cost to connect properties being really high cos one of your mates paid big money for some tom !!!! or Harry to lay some pipe is no good reference.

Anyway I've lived in a district heated block for two years.
The hot pipes which were pretty small were run outside the block to individual properties as you can imagine... pretty darn cheap

I also own a terrace house which used to have district heating. The actual insulated pipe is still in the property it's about two inches thick (I assume most of that is insulation and the pipe inside is much smaller). This pipe ran through the ceiling of the ground floor to the other terrace properties
Roughly speaking that meant to add one additional property to that grid was only 4 meters of pipe no digging involved.

So yes I'm sure you can imagine silly ideas that will cost trillions
But the reality is it probably won't cost more than the drinking water supply infrastructure
Sure it's two insulted pipes rather than one non insulated pipe bit then the drinking water has a return of waste water which this doesn't need. The book value of the drinking water and waste water return and treatment is in the ballpark of £40-50 billion this would be similar


BTW if I was doing this I'd start backwards.
I'd connect up and build the last portion of the grid Frist.
The last portion would be one tank perhaps 1 ton of hot water feeding Perhaps 50 homes on one street.

I'd build that first. And connect 3 gas boilers to the tank and a suitable sized dual immersion heater in the tank too so lots of redundancy. That setup would cost around £10k then the cost to lay pipes to fifty homes. The pipes to the homes would be tiny even a 15mm pipe can supply the required energy to a property so you don't need big expensive holes I'd imagine an advanced 'chasing saw' or similar

Anyway this street level distributed grid offers a better experience than todayeven if powered by natural gas as today's homes are.
Instead of having 50 homes with 50 boilers 50 tanks and 50 gas supplies you only need one tank and 4 boilers. It would cost less. The homes would pay about 4p for heat which would be lower cost than natural gas + self owned boiler

In the future you could also connect up heat pumps to this street grid so you can have three larger heat pumps supplying that 1 ton tank rather than 50 individual heat pumps

Or in the future you can hook up your fantasy hydrogen boilers from excess wind

Or in the future you can hook up nuclear heat.

So this street level distributed heat makes it easier for any and all tech (apart from resistive heating).

Build that out over a period of 5-10 years which Ch gives more time to see how wind power develops. If wind get really cheap then just don't use the gas boilers on these tanks use the resistance heaters inside there you go heating mostly solved (apart from windless winter weeks) in which case fire up the attached gas boilers. You can get to 70% wind power 30% natural gas.
Or high temp heat pumps if you want to conserve some electricity and heat pumps are affordable

If however you find you want to make heating 100% fossil free and that electrifying heating is proving to be more than you imagined then you have most of the bits in place to feed these tanks with nuclear heat.

GreatApe

Plus you don't necessarily have to connect every homes to the grid via on street burried pipes

The energy company can offer 'storage homes' discounted heating maybe 50% off

Said homes would host a 500 litre tank which the district heating system would heat

From that tank perhaps ten homes to the right and ten homes to the left would get their hot water and heating needs. A 22mm hot and a 15mm return would probably be sufficient (larger hot needed for showers etc while the return is only for central heating). The last home would be only 50 meters away in more or less a straight line


What's more convenient for a typical home. A simple small pipe in to replace their boiler
Or to rip out the radiators
Chase the walls
Lay new pipes
Install bigger fatter pipes
Install a tank
Install an air source heat pump that will only last about 15 years

GreatApe

100GW of heat reactors perhaps £50 billion and would last 60-100 years

200GW capacity of offshore wind power (50% CF during winter to give 100GW average) would cost? £900 billion?

The £2.65bn project, which involves 84 huge turbines, came fully online in May and achieved 588MW of electricity.

Scaled up to 200GW would be £900 billion

While you can reduce the 200GW wind capacity needs by 2-3x using mass heat pumps rather than electric heaters you then have to buy and install 35 million heat pump systems. And many homes won't be an easy upgrade as they will also need their radiators replaced too with much bigger ones. Plus some homes especially smaller flats won't have the space. So still hundreds of billions

While a distributed heating hot water pipe system won't be cheap (around £50 billion is my estimate) nor will the grid upgrades and backups CCGTs which would be needed to incorporate and distribute 200GW of offshore wind (or 80GW + mass heat pumps)

Both difficult but the heat pump version is multiple times harder costlier and slower

pile-o-stone

Please don't feed the troll

GreatApe

Norway electricity peak winter month electricity useage (15.5TWh for 5.3 million people) needs scaled to UK is an average 270GW......Yes 270GW I had to double check

So electrified heating in the UK could need something not far from that. Going from about 50GW peak winter demands to over 200GW....

This seems ridiculous doesn't it! Perhaps I have my numbers wrong...let's look at France...peak winter electricity demand can exceed 100GW as in 2017 and France isn't close to 100% electricity heated they are still mostly gas boiler heated. About 55% gas boilers Vs about 85% in the UK. So a switch of 30% adds about 50GW to peak winter grid demands. Going towards 0% gas boilers would thus take France peak demands towards 200GW+ which corresponds well to Norway scaled up as 270GW (Norway is colder) the UK would probably be somewhere in between

So there is a first order guess. UK peak winter demands if heating was electrified would be on the order of 200+ GW up from 50GW today.....ouch....but don't worry the cheerleaders will be along shortly to explain that this will be tea cakes and cookies cos wind power and massive grid upgrades is cheaper than a bag of chips

Electrifying heating for one individual home might be easy, do it nationally and...well....two hundred billion watts....200GW peak electricity demand....good luck with that!

zeupater

pile-o-stone wrote: »

Please don't feed the troll

Hi

I've simply been addressing & supporting a post made by Hexane a few days ago ... had no idea that the troll has been reacting as it's been on my ignore list for ages (only profile ever at that!) ...

Anyway, so not to waste the research conducted yesterday - based on analysis of reported new strategic pumped mains water provision projects over the past few years resolving to around £3million/mile, the final price in the infrastructure cost puzzle, the local heat-grid provision using insulated pipelines (single & multi-core), seems to add an additional cost likely being somewhere approaching £1trillion & potentially up to £2trillion pounds to the total after disruption costs are applied ....

However low the cost of heat generation may be, the relative cost of a national heat-grid approach totally dwarfs it .... perhaps the affordable solution involving nuclear heat provision would involve building a nuclear plant on Hyde Park & other undeveloped areas in centres of population, but the likelihood of that being well received is? .... :whistle:

Enough said, no need for more ....

HTH
Z

NigeWick

zeupater wrote: »

A national heat distribution infrastructure has staggering costs & staggering thermal inefficiencies, resulting in staggering costs in creating the centralised thermal plant ...

How much (extra) would it cost to make all new builds Zero Carbon, or whatever the correct expression is, so they hardly need any heating?

GreatApe

NigeWick wrote: »

How much (extra) would it cost to make all new builds Zero Carbon, or whatever the correct expression is, so they hardly need any heating?

New builds will be all electric come 2025 (this should be moved forward to 2021) the cost of which will be relatively affordable.

But new builds from 2025-2050 will represent approximately 5 million of the then 34 million homes So 15% of the 2050 housing stock will be homes built 2025-2050)

The bulk of housing offices shops etc are already existing. The cost of which conversions to heat pumps and oversized radiators and perhaps putting new pipes into walls is neither cheap nor quick. You are probably looking at one week's work and discomfort for the occupiers and £10k + multiply that by 29 million homes gets you £290+ billion in cost probably add 30% to that to take into account we have many more buildings than just houses. Offices shops light industrial space and water heating etc and you are at £400 billion

That's before the cost of upgrading the grid to handle 200GW peak winter demands
Building 150 large 1GW gas fired CCGTs for backup (or even a bigger cost if you do wind to hydrogen to hydrogen turbines)
And some 100-150+ GW of offshore wind to power this all
It's Gona add up to £1 trillion plus

Heating is much much more difficult than greening the current electricity grid
Even France hasn't solved heating (30% electrified heating 55% natural gas 15% other) and they have peak winter demands of over 100GW some years eg 2017 peak winter demand was over 100GW and that's only with about 30% of their heating needs electrified