The Alternative Green Energy Thread

JKenH

https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=7-days&start=2022-03-21&&_k=x94o8e

Interesting to see just how consistently low wind output has been over the last week, generating on average just 2.30GW compared to 16.28 GW from fossil fuels and 5.45GW from Nuclear. The totals for the week are 0.38TWh from wind compared to 2.72TWh from fossil fuels and 0.91TWh from nuclear.

For wind to replace fossil fuel usage we would need to add more than 10 x our existing capacity or we could build storage to take advantage of both intermittent wind and solar generation. 

If, say we had double the existing capacity of both our existing wind and solar we would then have been able to generate 1.42TWh. If we doubled it again then 2.84 TWh would have been generated, now only a mere 13.44 TWh short of our fossil fuel generation. At this stage we would need 13.44 TWh of storage to cover the shortfall if we closed all our FF generating plants. Tesla quote $1,235,890 for a 3MWh pack in California. 

We would need 4,480,000 of those. Let’s assume the price in the Uk would be £1m for a Megapack then the total investment in storage would be £4.48Tn. This seems a ridiculously high number so I hope I have got the right number of zeros. In addition to this of course we have added around 72 GW capacity in wind farms which would be £0.12Tn and 45 GW of solar at a cost of around £0.09Tn, (peanuts compared to the cost of storage). 

Or we could just make up the shortfall in generation by building an additional 4 HPCs at a cost of around £0.1Tn. So 4 new HPCs would solve the problem for half the cost of rolling out a 300% increase in wind and solar, let alone the mind numbing expenditure on storage that would be required to needed to deal with the intermittency problem that still remains with wind and solar. 

Imagine we built 12 new HPCs to replace our existing nuclear fleet with a capacity of 43.2 GW at a cost of £0.3Tn which meets our current needs. We would have the potential then to back those up with intraday storage of say 10 GWh at a cost of £0.0033tn (£3.3bn). We could service them in the summer when demand was less. Anything our existing intermittent renewables generated could be diverted to generating hydrogen. 

This is not intended as a pro nuclear argument, rather an attempt to understand the true cost of meeting our generation needs purely from renewables compared to our existing fossil fuel plants and the alternatives. 

I do hope someone will check my calculations, please, and let me know so I can correct them if  required and apologise if they are completely wrong. The storage figures just seem so horrendous that I find it hard to believe they can be right. If they are then goodness help us.

Edit:  I finally found the flaw in my £4.4tn figure. I somehow converted the average 16.28 GW average into 16.28 TWh not the 2735 GWh I should have.  So applying that correction and the 90% reduction in storage costs by using pumped hydro instead of batteries (see post on 6April) we now have a much more manageable £91bn or around 4 HPCs. 

Apologies to all. 

JKenH

Where has all the wind gone?

Having completed the exercise above looking at renewables over the last 7 days I looked at today’s statistics and cannot recall seeing wind generation at such a low level, averaging just 0.57GW so far today, that’s around 3% of installed capacity and just 2% of demand. Meanwhile fossil fuels have averaged 19GW, that’s 33 times what we are getting from wind and gas generation at one stage today was over 21GW.

Edit: I have checked other sources and the figures appear to be correct.

https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2022-03-28&&_k=wv3d3q

QrizB

JKenH said:

Where has all the wind gone?

We've got a ridge of high pressure over us, in just the right/wrong place. There are literally no isobars crossing the mainland UK.

It happens now and again, see for example the 2nd of July last year:
https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2021-07-02&&_k=ziztd0

I'm not planning to look through the whole of the Drax archive to find a longer period, but it happens.

[Edit to add surface pressure chart and correct/expand text.]

2nd_time_buyer

QrizB said:

JKenH said:

Where has all the wind gone?

We've got a high pressure area over us, in just the right place. It happens from time to time.

See for example the 2nd of July last year:
https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2021-07-02&&_k=ziztd0

I'm not plannign to look through the whole of the Drax archive to find a longer period, but it happens.

It does make me wonder if the balance between wind and solar in the UK is right. Whilst wind has a much higher capacity factor, the generally negative correlation between wind and sun and that solar is generating in daylight hours makes it more valuable than the numbers suggest. If we had triple the solar capacity last week, it would have made up most of the shortfall in wind.

Perhaps the government strategy (assuming there is one) is that solar will increase through domestic installations. I for one, am very interested to see how much domestic solar is installed this year - it seems that there has been an explosion in interest.

Exiled_Tyke

2nd_time_buyer said:

QrizB said:

JKenH said:

Where has all the wind gone?

We've got a high pressure area over us, in just the right place. It happens from time to time.

See for example the 2nd of July last year:
https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2021-07-02&&_k=ziztd0

I'm not plannign to look through the whole of the Drax archive to find a longer period, but it happens.

It does make me wonder if the balance between wind and solar in the UK is right. Whilst wind has a much higher capacity factor, the generally negative correlation between wind and sun and that solar is generating in daylight hours makes it more valuable than the numbers suggest. If we had triple the solar capacity last week, it would have made up most of the shortfall in wind.

Perhaps the government strategy (assuming there is one) is that solar will increase through domestic installations. I for one, am very interested to see how much domestic solar is installed this year - it seems that there has been an explosion in interest.

Looks like the decision needs to be between more solar and storage (or to be more precise a determined balance between the two).  Solar quicker and easier but cannot guarantee to compensate for wind and is rubbish in winter.  Storage - not really ready to roll out yet on a big scale.  Then of course there is the African solar export project.....

JKenH

2nd_time_buyer said:

QrizB said:

JKenH said:

Where has all the wind gone?

We've got a high pressure area over us, in just the right place. It happens from time to time.

See for example the 2nd of July last year:
https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2021-07-02&&_k=ziztd0

I'm not plannign to look through the whole of the Drax archive to find a longer period, but it happens.

It does make me wonder if the balance between wind and solar in the UK is right. Whilst wind has a much higher capacity factor, the generally negative correlation between wind and sun and that solar is generating in daylight hours makes it more valuable than the numbers suggest. If we had triple the solar capacity last week, it would have made up most of the shortfall in wind.

Perhaps the government strategy (assuming there is one) is that solar will increase through domestic installations. I for one, am very interested to see how much domestic solar is installed this year - it seems that there has been an explosion in interest.

Domestic solar doesn’t appear in the generation figures but I think the overall demand is net of domestic generation. Over the last week that might have reduced overall demand by up to 15GWh/day or around 3 GW at lunchtime. 

You are quite right, there has been a huge upsurge in demand and panels are in short supply. The DNO says I can’t add any more panels to the 26 already on my roof but I did buy a stand alone 330w panel this month as an experiment to top up my PPS which I have been using at night to run my plasma TV and in the morning to boil a low wattage kettle and cook toast. It’s not economic really given my current GO Faster tariff but fun to play around with. I have it mounted on casters so can swivel it round to optimise generation. Potentially around 8 Os are achievable which would just fill my PPS.

JKenH

Exiled_Tyke said:

2nd_time_buyer said:

QrizB said:

JKenH said:

Where has all the wind gone?

We've got a high pressure area over us, in just the right place. It happens from time to time.

See for example the 2nd of July last year:
https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?start=2021-07-02&&_k=ziztd0

I'm not plannign to look through the whole of the Drax archive to find a longer period, but it happens.

It does make me wonder if the balance between wind and solar in the UK is right. Whilst wind has a much higher capacity factor, the generally negative correlation between wind and sun and that solar is generating in daylight hours makes it more valuable than the numbers suggest. If we had triple the solar capacity last week, it would have made up most of the shortfall in wind.

Perhaps the government strategy (assuming there is one) is that solar will increase through domestic installations. I for one, am very interested to see how much domestic solar is installed this year - it seems that there has been an explosion in interest.

Looks like the decision needs to be between more solar and storage (or to be more precise a determined balance between the two).  Solar quicker and easier but cannot guarantee to compensate for wind and is rubbish in winter.  Storage - not really ready to roll out yet on a big scale.  Then of course there is the African solar export project.....

Remember when it was all so simple - you just burned coal when you needed it. We mined our own so security of supply wasn’t an issue - except of course the unions had the power to turn off the lights. Maggie wasn’t having that so out went coal. Now we are beholden to foreign suppliers.

The world has now realised that we aren’t all one big happy family and security of supply now is once again (as it should be) our priority. How we achieve that I don’t know but I would be reluctant to outsource our energy generation in any significant quantities to other nation states. Even our European friends might cut up rough. 

I see the attraction of renewables in that we aren’t beholden to any other country but the intermittency problem is just too great to pretend we can ever totally rely 100% on them. The RE PR machine will argue otherwise but the storage sums just don’t stack up as I have tried to demonstrate in earlier posts today. To acknowledge that would undermine the whole myth that RE is the cheapest solution. The RE industry relies on someone else picking up the pieces on days like today when the wind doesn’t blow.

Cardew

JKenH said:

The RE PR machine will argue otherwise but the storage sums just don’t stack up as I have tried to demonstrate in earlier posts today. To acknowledge that would undermine the whole myth that RE is the cheapest solution. The RE industry relies on someone else picking up the pieces on days like today when the wind doesn’t blow.

Of course that source must not be nuclear, fracking, coal, or North Sea oil. Or Green Peace will be marching to Aldermaston and Greenham Common! 

JKenH

UK aims to quadruple offshore wind power in renewable energy push

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/29/uk-offshore-wind-power-renewable-energy-kwasi-kwarteng

That should solve all our problems 😂

Over the last 7 days offshore wind has averaged 0.22GW. so with a quadrupling of output from 11 to 50GW capacity it would have generated  1GW, that’s roughly 3% of demand. Has no one told the BEIS that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow for days on end? 

It doesn’t matter how cheap our electricity is if we haven’t  got any. 

JKenH

At the start of March Britain experienced its longest spell of low wind output in more than a decade.  

For more than a week calm weather covered the country.  Wind farm output fell to as low as 0.6 GW on the 3rd of March, in sharp contrast to the 18.1 GW delivered later on that month.  Power prices were typical for the time of year, suggesting that the system wasn’t particularly stressed though.

A prolonged period of low wind and low solar power output has been coined in German as a ‘Dunkelflaute’ (dunk-el-flout-eh)–– a dark wind lull.  The event at the start of March was the longest Dunkelflaute that Britain has experienced in the last decade.  Between the 26th of February and the 8th of March the capacity factor[1] of the national wind fleet did not go above 20%.  Its average over these 11 days was just 11%, less than a quarter of their average in the month either side.

Both the frequency and duration of these events matters.  Looking back over the Electric Insights archives, this was the longest cold-calm spell that Britain has experienced in over a decade.  February 2010 also saw 11 days with wind capacity factors never going above 20%.  However, back in 2010 most of Britain’s wind farms were onshore and so average capacity factors were lower.  Also, the impact of low wind speeds was barely noticeable back in 2010, as Britain’s wind capacity then was one-sixth of current levels.  

Based on longer records of historical wind speed data from Renewables.ninja, the March Dunkelflaute could be expected roughly once every 20 years, statistically speaking.  Prolonged low-wind periods should be accounted for when designing Britain’s energy system security, and they should not be seen as a ‘black swan event’ which cannot be anticipated.

https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind-goes-gas-fills-in-the-gap/

This could almost have been written about the last few days which have been very similar.