Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

michaels said:

I don't know if it is worth trying to explain. 

Excess RE will reduce prices when RE is producing.

This will reduce the return for generators that supply all the time as for some periods their output will be loss making.

Some of these suppliers will leave the market.

This will mean supply is tighter in the periods when renewables are not available.

Impact on prices: 
Lower when RE is plentiful (but not always passed on to consumers due to CFD?)
Higher (Possibly painfully so) prices when less RE is available as this is needed to reduce demand enough to match supply

Painfully high prices = poor people being cold

I am sure you can come back with a response but perhaps if you could tell me which step(s) in the logic you think are not valid that would really help me.

Where does the logic go wrong, well, pretty much all of it. To be clear, in my opinion what you are expressing is a theory, an extreme theory. You can't then apply the word logic or logical to something that is not logical, but instead requires a large number of claims that are simply illogical.

Let's just recap where this started, and that was with the news that PV generation costs are still falling. From there your response (as you and cells/GA have tried so many times) is to claim that generation capacity will continue to expand until the point that the industry collapses. Obviously that is silly (and illogical), since leccy supply like any other product/service, will find a sensible supply/demand level and price.

Your next step was to claim that the poor will pay eye watering prices as a result of these ever lower PV generation costs. To make this alarmist argument work, you have to move 'the poor' onto time of use tariffs, that will at times, according to you rise to Texas grid levels. This of course ignores the fact that in Texas there was a shortage of supply, not an excess of PV generation. It also ignores the fact that in Texas regulations were removed or avoided (deliberately) to allow this to happen, and recommendations (not requirements) were made to the generators to avoid this happening.

Now back to reality. In the UK we have very strong regulation requiring adequate supply to meet peaks, and for customer protection, including prices. The national Grid and ESO licences require them to be able to cope, and this is exactly what ESO has said they should be able to do as early as 2025. You might believe that short term 'painfully' high prices can be used to exploit 'the poor', such as the Texas prices of $9/kWh (£6.57/kWh (657p/kWh)), but I don't. 

Next we have to consider storage, as I and CW have mentioned, and you need to ignore completely, which is clearly not logical. This is absolutely essential for us to reach very high, hopefully 100%, RE generation*. For PV (and wind) to reach high penetration levels, we will need large scale, and ever longer term storage to absorb excess generation (excess above an economical waste level). This storage will not only absorb excess supply, it will also deploy during low generation periods. Clearly this storage will help to stabilise wholesale prices by removing excess, and reducing shortage.

None of this is theoretical, none of this is unexpected. All of this is already happening, yet you ignore it, or pretend it doesn't exist, in order to falsely suggest that your extreme scenario is logical, when it clearly isn't.

For a decade or more, some people have tried to claim that the sky is falling as a way to falsely criticise the rollout of RE. But the sky hasn't fallen, and prices have not risen as feared, despite past claims that they would, or your new claims that they will.

So, what do I object to - your attempts to suggest all these ridiculous negatives by presenting back to front, or ridiculously twisted claims, and using scare mongering 'Daily Mail'esque' tactics ........ over and over and over.



*As we approach higher levels of RE, we will also see HPC start generating (or not ;-) ), so it may be 100% low carbon generation, not 100% RE.

Lower when RE is plentiful (but not always passed on to consumers due to CFD?)

Interesting that you use the CfD mechanism to suggest consumers won't benefit from low prices, but fail to mention how that would work for high prices too!

Eg, If PV has a CfD of £40/MWh, and sells into a wholesale price of £20/MWh, then the subsidy pot will top this up by £20/MWh to reach that £40/MWh CfD contract.
If it sells into a wholesale price of £100/MWh, then it will have to pay the extra £60/MWh (above the CfD strike price) back into the subsidy pot.
So it works both ways.

michaels

Perhaps we are on safer ground discussing the pros and cons of banning short haul (domestic) flights?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56716708

France is banning domestic flights where there is a train alternative taking less than 150 minutes.  No doubt makes sense environmentally but it is also anti-competitive which no doubt means higher fares.

Martyn1981

There's no stopping the Scots. Clearly not satisfied with reaching 97% net RE leccy last year, now they are to start supplying green hydrogen to the commercial market.

ScottishPower files to build Whitelee clean energy hub

ScottishPower has filed a planning application to create a clean energy and hydrogen production hub at its 539MW Whitelee wind farm in Scotland.
The consent paperwork seeks approval for a 20MW electrolyser powered by up to 40MW of solar and 50MW of battery energy storage.

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

There's no stopping the Scots. Clearly not satisfied with reaching 97% net RE leccy last year, now they are to start supplying green hydrogen to the commercial market.

ScottishPower files to build Whitelee clean energy hub

ScottishPower has filed a planning application to create a clean energy and hydrogen production hub at its 539MW Whitelee wind farm in Scotland.
The consent paperwork seeks approval for a 20MW electrolyser powered by up to 40MW of solar and 50MW of battery energy storage.

I wonder how the tech works, the mention of batteries interests me as hydrogen generation has been mentioned in the past as a use for RE overspill but batteries suggests to me that this particular process does not work with intermittent supply but needs to run fairly continuously?

Solarchaser

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

There's no stopping the Scots. Clearly not satisfied with reaching 97% net RE leccy last year, now they are to start supplying green hydrogen to the commercial market.

ScottishPower files to build Whitelee clean energy hub

ScottishPower has filed a planning application to create a clean energy and hydrogen production hub at its 539MW Whitelee wind farm in Scotland.
The consent paperwork seeks approval for a 20MW electrolyser powered by up to 40MW of solar and 50MW of battery energy storage.

I wonder how the tech works, the mention of batteries interests me as hydrogen generation has been mentioned in the past as a use for RE overspill but batteries suggests to me that this particular process does not work with intermittent supply but needs to run fairly continuously?

This site already has batteries, or is in the process of installing them also, as a completely separate entity to the hydrogen proposal.

https://renews.biz/61692/scottishpower-picks-ingeteam-for-whitelee-battery/

So it's back to the old conversation of batteries or hydrogen...... no, batteries and (then?)hydrogen. 

Great to see whitelees moving forward, and still making better use of the old moors. 
Plus my kids prefer going the old moors Road and see the windmills, rather than taking the faster motorway route when heading down to Ayrshire 

michaels

Solarchaser said:

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

There's no stopping the Scots. Clearly not satisfied with reaching 97% net RE leccy last year, now they are to start supplying green hydrogen to the commercial market.

ScottishPower files to build Whitelee clean energy hub

ScottishPower has filed a planning application to create a clean energy and hydrogen production hub at its 539MW Whitelee wind farm in Scotland.
The consent paperwork seeks approval for a 20MW electrolyser powered by up to 40MW of solar and 50MW of battery energy storage.

I wonder how the tech works, the mention of batteries interests me as hydrogen generation has been mentioned in the past as a use for RE overspill but batteries suggests to me that this particular process does not work with intermittent supply but needs to run fairly continuously?

This site already has batteries, or is in the process of installing them also, as a completely separate entity to the hydrogen proposal.

https://renews.biz/61692/scottishpower-picks-ingeteam-for-whitelee-battery/

So it's back to the old conversation of batteries or hydrogen...... no, batteries and (then?)hydrogen. 

Great to see whitelees moving forward, and still making better use of the old moors. 
Plus my kids prefer going the old moors Road and see the windmills, rather than taking the faster motorway route when heading down to Ayrshire 

Thanks, so the batteries are not there purely to support the hydrogen generation, reassuring.

Martyn1981

Clearly this woman can multitask!

So, not content with embarassing most of the World with 'sensible' Covid policies, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the New Zealand Government are now rolling out sensible policies to help combat the climate crisis.

New Zealand introduces climate change law for financial firms in world first

SYDNEY, April 13 (Reuters) - New Zealand has become the first country to introduce a law that will require banks, insurers and investment managers to report the impacts of climate change on their business, minister for climate change James Shaw said on Tuesday.
All banks with total assets of more than NZ$1 billion ($703 million), insurers with more than NZ$1 billion in total assets under management, and all equity and debt issuers listed on the country's stock exchange will have to make disclosures.

Martyn1981

I suppose this is energy avoidance, which is cool (literally) too.

Whitest-ever paint could help cool heating Earth, study shows

The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years.

White-painted roofs have been used to cool buildings for centuries. As global heating pushes temperatures up, the technique is also being used on modern city buildings, such as in Ahmedabad in India and New York City in the US.

Currently available reflective white paints are far better than dark roofing materials, but only reflect 80-90% of sunlight and absorb UV light. This means they cannot cool surfaces below ambient temperatures. The new paint does this, leading to less need for air conditioning and the carbon emissions they produce, which are rising rapidly.

Parnell said a comparison of the carbon dioxide emitted by the mining of barium sulphate with the emissions saved from lower air conditioning use would be needed to fully assess the new paint. He also said green roofs, on which plants grow, could be more sustainable where practical.

Project Drawdown, a charity that assesses climate solutions, estimates that white roofs and green roofs could avoid between 600m and 1.1bn tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050, roughly equivalent to two to three years of the UK’s total annual emissions.

silverwhistle

Martyn1981 said:

I suppose this is energy avoidance, which is cool (literally) too.

Whitest-ever paint could help cool heating Earth, study shows

Which reminds me of this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10333304

Unfortunately, like many items of news the media never follows up and I've been unable to find, after a cursory search, any further news about how this worked.

Anybody who skis or mountaineers will know how snow melts around an exposed rock, so it would be an interesting experiment to spray a few such rocks, which are often glacial erratics in the middle of the piste, to see what localised impacts there are.

QrizB

Martyn1981 said:

I suppose this is energy avoidance, which is cool (literally) too.

Whitest-ever paint could help cool heating Earth, study shows

The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years.

I don't wish to seem too sceptical, but I'm pretty sure "In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight" violates one (or more) of the Laws of Thermodynamics.