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  • silverwhistle
    silverwhistle Posts: 3,791 Forumite
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    Talking of housing and what could be done with a bit more support:
    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/07/dutch-eco-homes-idea-arrives-in-uk-and-cuts-energy-bills-in-half-nottingham-energiesprong
  • Martyn1981
    Martyn1981 Posts: 14,762 Forumite
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    edited 8 January 2019 at 8:15AM
    zeupater wrote: »
    Hi

    Yes, but there's a difference between what's possible and what can be delivered within what are pretty tight timescales ....

    We simply can't argue about not needing gas as the transition energy source because it's what's being expanded as the transition energy source ... effectively it's a case that gas will need to be extracted from somewhere, so what we're discussing is national nimbyism ....

    HTH
    Z

    Perhaps that's where the misunderstanding is. I believe gas consumption can be reduced rather than expanded, with measures to improve efficiency, insulation and heat pump use. The smaller amount of gas used in leccy generation could, dare I say, more easily be dealt with simply through continuing policies to decarbonise the grid, and expand RE generation. As mentioned when I posted this article a few days ago, even with the decline of coal, gas consumption for leccy generation is similar to 10yrs ago, and we can rollout more RE generation at a faster rate than the combined decline of coal + EV rollout + electrification of space heating, which is very promising.

    And my main concerns about fracking are not from a national level but from a global one, in that adding more FF extraction to what is already recognised as being far in excess of the extraction/consumption that the planet can process without serious AGW.

    My national concerns, which I don't believe are NIMBYism (since Wales is blocking fracking), is that the process could be highly polluting, especially in GHG emissions, but more importantly probably won't be successful (like Poland) nor economical, so we will have wasted time and effort.

    I don't know if the Ecotricity green gas mills option is truly economically viable, but they are applying for licences wherever fracking licences are sought, and options like bio-gas (or demand reduction) are at least long term solutions (hopefully medium term too), whereas fracking is more of a hope.

    I don't believe the use of NIMBYism here is fair nor warranted. I don't support fracking because I don't believe it's a real solution, and better options are available to the UK (and world) governments. I may be wrong, but those are my real beliefs.
    Mart. Cardiff. 5.58 kWp PV systems (3.58 ESE & 2.0 WNW)

    For general PV advice please see the PV FAQ thread on the Green & Ethical Board.
  • Martyn1981
    Martyn1981 Posts: 14,762 Forumite
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    India is still falling behind on its enormous RE deployment targets for 2022, but it seems they haven't given up yet.

    India Eyes 80 Gigawatts Of Solar & Wind Tenders By March 2020
    The Indian government has reiterated its commitment to auction large volumes of solar and wind energy capacity in order to achieve the target of 100 gigawatts solar and 60 gigawatts of wind energy capacity operational by 31 March 2022.

    In a press release issued by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), the government stated that it plans to auction 60 gigawatts of solar power capacity and 20 gigawatts of wind energy capacity by March 2020 in order to achieve those targets.
    Mart. Cardiff. 5.58 kWp PV systems (3.58 ESE & 2.0 WNW)

    For general PV advice please see the PV FAQ thread on the Green & Ethical Board.
  • NigeWick
    NigeWick Posts: 2,715 Forumite
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    zeupater wrote: »
    If the shale gas that's found is of poor quality or economically unviable to extract then so be it, but not looking 'just in case' is a really poor strategy, in terms that we're used to it would be akin to banning the development of EVs because they are too expensive to build, have little supporting infrastructure and no proof that there's enough demand to warrant doing anything ...
    That's comparing apple and oranges. Burning stuff for energy can never be good for the environment. BEVs powered by wind or sun are far better than ICE vehicles. Obviously no vehicles would be even better. Beam me up Z.
    The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • NigeWick
    NigeWick Posts: 2,715 Forumite
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    Martyn1981 wrote: »
    I may be wrong, but those are my real beliefs.
    Z always makes good well reasoned points. Doesn't stop us disagreeing though. Doesn't make any of us 100% correct either. Well, apart from me...
    The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • zeupater
    zeupater Posts: 5,355 Forumite
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    edited 8 January 2019 at 2:42PM
    Martyn1981 wrote: »
    Perhaps that's where the misunderstanding is. I believe gas consumption can be reduced rather than expanded, with measures to improve efficiency, insulation and heat pump use. The smaller amount of gas used in leccy generation could, dare I say, more easily be dealt with simply through continuing policies to decarbonise the grid, and expand RE generation. As mentioned when I posted this article a few days ago, even with the decline of coal, gas consumption for leccy generation is similar to 10yrs ago, and we can rollout more RE generation at a faster rate than the combined decline of coal + EV rollout + electrification of space heating, which is very promising.

    And my main concerns about fracking are not from a national level but from a global one, in that adding more FF extraction to what is already recognised as being far in excess of the extraction/consumption that the planet can process without serious AGW.

    My national concerns, which I don't believe are NIMBYism (since Wales is blocking fracking), is that the process could be highly polluting, especially in GHG emissions, but more importantly probably won't be successful (like Poland) nor economical, so we will have wasted time and effort.

    I don't know if the Ecotricity green gas mills option is truly economically viable, but they are applying for licences wherever fracking licences are sought, and options like bio-gas (or demand reduction) are at least long term solutions (hopefully medium term too), whereas fracking is more of a hope.

    I don't believe the use of NIMBYism here is fair nor warranted. I don't support fracking because I don't believe it's a real solution, and better options are available to the UK (and world) governments. I may be wrong, but those are my real beliefs.
    Hi

    In reality it's almost inevitable that gas consumption within the UK still has two peaks to hit, maximum annual & maximum spot ... and there's little we can do or say to mitigate this without impacting on the decarbonisation timeline as there are no viable alternative solutions which can be delivered as quickly without stalling other developments such as EVs ....

    As the renewables sector and it's various technologies grow it will simply reduce the growth in the need for gas and bring forward the peak annual demand, after which total consumption will fall .... however, at this point there will need to be even more gas generation capacity commissioned to act as a reserve for winter nights with low renewables generation. As almost all of our neighborhood countries are transitioning at the same time it would be remiss to expect any considerable energy gap to be filled by interconnectors without considerable risk.

    Effectively, if gas needs to be extracted to meet demand, then it needs to be sourced from somewhere, which means that to meet a temporary demand peak there will either need to be a concerted global effort to build distributed strategic storage reserves for gas sourced from extraction expansion in current producing countries, or develop local production where possible, so of course opposition to exploring local supply must be considered as nimbyism if there's acceptance that supply is necessary ... it's pretty much inevitable that gas consumption will reach these two future peaks no matter how much we debate, argue or protest as every other acceptable alternative simply pushes decarbonisation back by decades.

    Regarding shale gas being a 'hope'; well it may be, but conversely it may be both plentiful & cheap to deliver .... in not exploring the possibility we simply don't know, but formulating a position to not even try based on the worry of the possibility of failure tends to fail the basic logic test, especially so as the cost & effort expended can be bourne by the private sector & extraction sites developed in parallel to renewables without impacting timelines.

    Where we are results from poor government & indecision for at least a couple of decades & there's nothing we can do about it now, so we need to do what we can with what we have and what needs to be done must be simple, achievable, low risk, and fast - all of which is unachievable without utilising gas as a major transition enabler, but importantly, the risk element is considerably reduced through developing local gas reserves and the economic multiplier effect could help fund the transition itself.

    HTH
    Z
    "We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit. " ...... Aristotle
    B)
  • zeupater
    zeupater Posts: 5,355 Forumite
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    NigeWick wrote: »
    That's comparing apple and oranges. Burning stuff for energy can never be good for the environment. BEVs powered by wind or sun are far better than ICE vehicles. Obviously no vehicles would be even better. Beam me up Z.
    Hi

    The analogy was really one of indecision -or- decision based on worry of failure -or- decision specifically to encourage failure, all of which can be detrimental to goal delivery ...

    What doesn't change is that gas will be the fallback energy source for electricity and the prime source for domestic heating for decades to come, yes total annual consumption will fall first as efficiencies improve, but the total installed generation capacity will need to remain high to cope with peaks in times of low renewables supply ... effectively, the position we're in dictates that we'll be 'burning stuff' for a while yet!

    HTH
    Z
    "We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit. " ...... Aristotle
    B)
  • Martyn1981
    Martyn1981 Posts: 14,762 Forumite
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    edited 8 January 2019 at 3:25PM
    zeupater wrote: »
    Hi

    In reality it's almost inevitable that gas consumption within the UK still has two peaks to hit, maximum annual & maximum spot ... and there's little we can do or say to mitigate this without impacting on the decarbonisation timeline as there are no viable alternative solutions which can be delivered as quickly without stalling other developments such as EVs ....

    Perhaps this is where my confusion lies. I thought we'd already peaked with gas consumption in the 2000's being higher than the 2010's.

    We've seen an improvement in heating efficiency and housing insulation reducing domestic demand by about 25%.

    Consumption due to leccy generation is also lower, though it has gone part way back up in the last two years as coal has dropped off significantly, but is still on a medium to long term decline.

    I have mentioned EV's (and heat pumps earlier) and the growth in RE generation (nearly +30% of leccy gen in ~10yrs) will outpace the transition of transport and space heating to leccy. [I'm assuming any reduction in new nuclear capacity will be offset by additional RE gen.] Also we have what is effectively an unlimited potential of off-shore wind generation, assuming RE balance/storage is resolved.

    zeupater wrote: »
    As the renewables sector and it's various technologies grow it will simply reduce the growth in the need for gas and bring forward the peak annual demand, after which total consumption will fall .... however, at this point there will need to be even more gas generation capacity commissioned to act as a reserve for winter nights with low renewables generation. As almost all of our neighborhood countries are transitioning at the same time it would be remiss to expect any considerable energy gap to be filled by interconnectors without considerable risk.

    HTH
    Z

    So I think this is what it bubbles down to, will it just reduce the growth of gas, or is gas consumption already on the decline.

    This is where I got my info from:

    Historical gas data: gas production and consumption and fuel input

    But I will openly admit that I found a lot of contradictory info, difficulty comparing GWh data to 'tonnes of oil equivalent', and even some stats that I simply can't fathom, such as this 'decline' which doesn't match up at all (I think?)

    Natural gas consumption in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2003 to 2017 (in million metric tons of oil equivalent)


    So, back to my position. If gas consumption is already under control, and I admit to some confusion now, then expanding FF extraction seems wholly unwarranted when we could instead focus on reducing gas consumption, particularly nat-gas consumption.

    Edit - If we know we can reduce gas consumption already, and produce bio-gas (if economical) then is a bet on frackgas worth it even if the industry is successful.

    Second edit - another graph I found, which isn't really related, but I thought it was interesting is the first one in this link showing UK energy consumption falling 20% over the last ~20yrs.

    Hope this makes sense.
    Mart. Cardiff. 5.58 kWp PV systems (3.58 ESE & 2.0 WNW)

    For general PV advice please see the PV FAQ thread on the Green & Ethical Board.
  • zeupater
    zeupater Posts: 5,355 Forumite
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    edited 8 January 2019 at 8:57PM
    Hi

    In that lies the transition trap ... you simply can't assume that renewable energy generation can be balanced by any storage other than massive builds of centralised strategic pumped hydro because of the length of periods of generation lulls and you can't assume that biogas resources can be developed & delivered within the required timescales ....

    Insulation issue, well fine, but in reality most of the 'low hanging fruit' has already been addressed by those who are able or willing to do so - it's not that what's been done has happened over the past few years either, it's the cumulative effect of decades of improvements. Yes, more could be done, but will it happen ... there's recently been a development where standard specification properties were improved to somewhere close to our home's level of efficiency, the cost? - well somewhere around £85k each, but the developer believes that it could reduce to £50k if more were done .... so do we immediately upgrade the UK housing stock at the cost of going on towards a couple of £trillion -or- condem the vast majority of properties and have people rebuild them as alternatives to reliance on transition gas consumption?

    As we know, we're knocking on the door of a rapid transition to EVs and they'll need sufficient power generation to ensure that charging is possible at whatever time of year that it's needed ... we've all had this discussion a number of times - it'll require additional generation capacity which will impact on both total gas consumption and peak gas supply as a backup to RE. It's worthy to note that official assessments of what additional capacity is required already includes the banking of considerable & ongoing efficiency improvements ... that's where certain individuals <cough> seriously overestimate the additional generation required to feed the EVs when compared to figures calculated by others, such as National Grid ....

    ... and all of this comes before we even start to consider the generation load required to displace gas used in boilers at 80%-90% efficiency with gas based electricity generation at around 50% efficiency feeding a mix of space heating at a COP of (say) 3.5 and DHW at par ... overall you may be using around half the power when needed, but that's at the cost of ensuring electricity supply.

    Yes, there are alternatives and they can definitely work, but there are very few which can be scalable to the transition requirements and fewer that could be implemented quickly enough .... consider how many plans there are to flood Welsh & Scottish valleys to create pumped storage facilities on the scale of the Elan Valley reservoir complex to create a few days of strategic energy reserve and how long it would take to plan, approve & build where nothing has yet been done ... 30-50 years seems to be commonplace for major infrastructure projects these days & that's effectively unacceptable!

    HTH
    Z
    "We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit. " ...... Aristotle
    B)
  • Martyn1981
    Martyn1981 Posts: 14,762 Forumite
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    edited 9 January 2019 at 8:05AM
    You're right that we can't assume that bio-gas or leccy storage can be delivered as hoped, but your concerns there mirror mine over fracking which is also not guaranteed, and may fail.

    So we share the same concerns if you think about it, but the RE route is one we have to take anyway as gas is not a long term solution since the CO2 is too high to meet our targets.

    So why gamble on fracking when we have to develop the RE alternatives anyway. [Edit - and my main concerns are that it will act as a diversion to slow down the UK's move away from FF consumption, and improve efficiencies/insulation. M.]

    We also need to look at primary and final energy consumption. The 50% of leccy coming from gas is at about 50% efficiency, so by rolling out more RE we can displace about 2kWh's of gas with 1kWh of RE generation.

    I'd hope that better building standards going forward, and a real drive towards better insulation such as EWI on older properties could half domestic space heating needs from gas*, and then taking boiler v's heat pump efficiencies into account, reduce them by a further factor of 4, so one additional kWh of RE generation replacing 8kWh's of gas today.

    [*Not all heating comes from central heating, some comes from solar gain, leccy use, DHW, cooking, body heat (humans and pets), so the % reduction in gas consumption for heating should be higher than the % reduction in heat loss.]

    I'm not that concerned about the EV transition as that will take quite a bit of time and there is no problem in producing more leccy to meet more demand, the UK's RE potential is not restricted by scale, we can roll out more and faster if we want, especially if market forces push us in that direction. I think the electrification of cars will add a gross figure of 20% to leccy demand, about 10% net after refinery savings - [Of course there will be much more again with other transport.] - but that figure will take 20+ years to arrive as we first need to get EV sales up from sub 5% to 50%+ of annual sales, and then the 10-20yrs for the existing ICE stock to 'retire'.

    Also, as we've seen now for a decade, the % of leccy generation from FF's has been dropping each year. I appreciate that those years won't reflect a large increase in EV's and heat pumps, but they are still in there, and as mentioned earlier, we can increase the rate of RE generation deployment if so wish.

    But more importantly, as raised in my previous post, you seemed to be working against a rising UK gas consumption, whilst I was basing my thoughts on a falling demand. In a rising scenario I would have to concede to your argument that we need to consider a source of additional gas production, but it looks to me that UK gas consumption peaked last decade.

    I do think the issue of UK gas consumption is really important to this discussion.
    Mart. Cardiff. 5.58 kWp PV systems (3.58 ESE & 2.0 WNW)

    For general PV advice please see the PV FAQ thread on the Green & Ethical Board.
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