Cycling UK Forum

Mick F wrote:Dunno how many windmills there are - 20 or more?
Only one was running and whizzing round like a gud un.
Why weren't the others running?

Also, you can see other wind farms around, and rarely - if ever - are all the 'mills going round.
Why aren't they ALL running when it's windy?

Another possible reason is that their electricity may not be needed. At times of low demand not all wind farm power is needed. So they are paid to stop producing.

More than £43M in 2014. So probably more now. Isn't wind wonderful?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/e ... h-off.html

In 2016 National Grid said

Britain will have too much electricity this summer due to the growth in wind and solar farms, National Grid has forecast, warning it could be forced to issue unprecedented emergency orders to power plants to switch off.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpre ... forecasts/

I pay 10p per KWh for grid power.

It's worth noting, though that this includes zero charge for the damage caused by emitting the CO2 from fossil fuels - the "externality".

Subsidies to renewables are essentially an attempt to level this playing field.

Solar is of course particularly problematic, as it is guaranteed to deliver peak power at the opposite time of year and day to when demand peaks. And there's nowhere near enough space in the UK to generate significant power from it. And despite recent price falls, it's still really expensive, even more so if you store the electricity in batteries! In Arizona, for instance, where aircon is a significant demand, and there's loads of land, and you get a lot more power per unit area, it would make a lot more sense.

In the UK, insulating homes and investing in public transport and, err... cycling would be better ways to spend your money.

Plus nuclear, of course.

As ever, the excellent "without hot air" by the late lamented David MacKay sets out the numbers.

http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

irc wrote:https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpre ... forecasts/

Even more reason for global distribution. We've got spare, other countries need it and they'll have spare energy when we need it.
What's not to like?

(It's not like distributing electricity is 'hard', we don't need to fill a ship up with it and sail it to where it's needed. Compared to gas and oil pipelines it's almost trivial)

Renewables including wind are a key part of the energy mix but we are not yet in a position to reduce other forms, or indeed our imports from the EU. There are interesting developments in storage technologies and grid systems that are needed first.

It is important to remember the number of zeros when talking about subsidies.

https://www.ft.com/content/b8e24306-48e ... e9211e86ab

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-UK ... 71602.html

It's worth noting that the site https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/ is not a reliable source.

It's run by one Paul Homewood who is a regular source of climate denial in the media. He claims, amongst many other conspiracy theories, that NASA is fabricating global temperature data.

See for instance http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/nothin ... ture-data/

The most reliable source of climate change data is the IPCC, set up by the UN and representing the views of actual scientists. Their most recent summary report is surprisingly readable.

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repor ... _FINAL.pdf

It's not even long term storage that is the issue - one of the lesser known issues is that the solar and wind farms tend to run 'clever' electronics to push power to the grid, not generators (big lumps of iron and copper).

Those turbines and generators, hundreds of tonnes whizzing around at 3000rpm, in all the power stations across the country contain a significant amount of energy - enough that when demand peaks they are all allowed to slow down slightly, releasing some of the energy into the grid and stabilising the voltage.

If we get rid of them all then we will end up with a much greater volatility of both frequency and voltage...
Or we'd need to have dedicated flywheels...

[XAP]Bob wrote:Or we'd need to have dedicated flywheels...

And why not? It's as good a system as any to provide quick bursts of energy.
Another way is to allow electric cars to dump power back onto the grid - in a few years there'll be lots of them attached to the grid at any given time.

Whatever happens there are lot's of problems to overcome but none of them is insurmountable. If we don't want to solve those particular ones then we've got the problems of resources and pollution.
There's no simple solution, the only guarantee is that at some point either all energy will be from renewable's or the human race will be an ex-race.

BrianFox wrote:

I pay 10p per KWh for grid power.

It's worth noting, though that this includes zero charge for the damage caused by emitting the CO2 from fossil fuels - the "externality".

Subsidies to renewables are essentially an attempt to level this playing field.

Actually the 10p a unit does includes CO2 charges. Because both coal and electricity generation pay carbon taxes (£15.50per MWh for coal and £6.60 per MWh for gas). In the case of coal this increases the fuel running cost by around 50% from around £30 per MWh to around £45MWh.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/201 ... -carbon-t/

UK and EU energy policies have got us to the point where electricity supply is only just sufficient in the coldest days of winter. Then because of all the subsidised wind,solar, and biomass we have reached the point where we will need to also subsidise gas power. As gas generation demand now varies so much and future outlook is so poor it isn't justifiable to build new plants purely on a commercial basis. Why build as plant that is only needed in low wind days in winter?

We barely have enough power now on cold calm winter days. Coal is getting phased out. Existing nuclear plants are long in the tooth. What happens when coal power has gone and nuclear is either closed down or frequently offline for break downs or maintenance.

Even a £450M subsidy wasn't enough to convince this company to build a new gas power station.

“it has become increasingly apparent that the current arrangements for supporting the development of new generation capacity do not give sufficient comfort for this to be brought forward without substantial and unacceptable risk to investors.”

http://www.powerengineeringint.com/arti ... bsidy.html

Actually the 10p a unit does includes CO2 charges

Yes, you're absolutely correct, my bad.

I should have said

It's worth noting, though that this includes inadequate charge to reflect the damage caused by emitting the CO2 from fossil fuels - the "externality".

I do agree with many of your criticisms of UK Energy policy. We are facing a transition to a sustainable future, and it will be impossible to achieve this painlessly. I don't think we're doing very well at the moment, there is a tendency to blame this on the greenies, but the reality is that fossil fuels are both damaging and finite, and the laws of physics are unmoved by political rhetoric.

I find it a bit worrying when coal is being phased out and I don't see a replacement on the horizon. All the wind and solar built to date still produces less than the coal plants we have left. And they produce nothing on a cold still evening in winter when demand is highest.

irc wrote:I find it a bit worrying when coal is being phased out and I don't see a replacement on the horizon. All the wind and solar built to date still produces less than the coal plants we have left. And they produce nothing on a cold still evening in winter when demand is highest.

annsum5.png

Then add in some tidal power generation, add in some storage.

Ian

And build some more flipping nukes..

Technically not renewable, but when you can build reactors to burn the waste of yesteryear, and produce stuff that is manageable as a next gen fuel then...

[XAP]Bob wrote:And build some more flipping nukes..

Technically not renewable, but when you can build reactors to burn the waste of yesteryear, and produce stuff that is manageable as a next gen fuel then...

+1

I've long thought it the least bad option.

[XAP]Bob wrote:And build some more flipping nukes.....

My worry in the UK about that direction is the way we seem to want to build them. Select a totally unproven technology with such capacity that we are very dependent on it working and being commissioned on schedule. Or rather tha "unproven" maybe that it has been proven to have loads of problems and issues such that no plants have yet been completed and working and all such designs are massively behind schedule.

And then we seem to be keen on passing future stations to the Chinese and I don't have much confidence in our political masters enforcing suitable safety and monitoring regimes when profit is on the line. These days it seems far to easy for a company to mess-up and then just walk away from the wreckage washing their hands of liability and leaving it for others to pay for and pick-up the pieces. We've already seen this with Hinckley where it has emerged that the UK taxpayer has underwritten the decommissioning waste disposal/storage costs "should it prove too expensive for EDF" or if we close the plant before 2060.

People complain about how much renewables are subsidised (ignoring the subsidies hydrocarbons get) and then ignore how much e.g. Hinckley is in effect being subsidised (or rather how much extra we will be paying so that the private operators will be guaranteed good profits).

I agree it, as a technology, might be least bad of the non-renewables options, but the way the UK is pursuing it makes it rather bad.

Also the UK needs to look more at the nature of it's demand as it is far more complex than totalling up generating megawatts to demand megawatts. A significant consideration is how our generating capacity can respond to demands on supply - and nuclear is not very good at that. For example, a Government report says how the equivalent of 4 Hinkleys could be added to the grid through just having smarter generation and storage. We've added a third of a Hinkley to the grid since 2010 just through interconnections to the continent to allow us to buy in cheaper electricity (though this could become a bit unreliable as France has to close down a lot of it''s nuclear generation capacity soon due to safety concerns (for tests) ... oh dear, EDF again ...).

And we keep overlooking (or cutting) energy efficiency measures. Take the reduction in electricity demand since 2010 and project forward and by the time Hinkley starts generating (assuming EDF ever get the design to work) then demand will have dropped by another 6 Hinkleys. And that's with the current government cutting back on their investment in energy efficiency.

Ian

Psamathe wrote:People complain about how much renewables are subsidised (ignoring the subsidies hydrocarbons get) and then ignore how much e.g. Hinckley is in effect being subsidised (or rather how much extra we will be paying so that the private operators will be guaranteed good profits).

The likes of Ecotricity and DONG Energy who bigger interests in UK renewable generation than unsustainable are minnows compared to those who have much stronger interests in the opposite direction (Centrica, EDF and so on), plus there's a legacy of hidden subsidies for which started in the days of nationalised unsustainable power before it was privatised in the unholy trinity of National Power, Powergen and Nuclear Electric - at that time, most of our renewable power was hydroelectric and that was seen as so irrelevant that one of the regional suppliers (Scottish Hydro) was allowed to keep it. So, subsidies of renewables are obvious while subsidies of unsustainables still get hidden.