Coal…

[Martin 100Participant @martin100]

To continue:

The published £92.50/MWh for Hinkley Point C (and £89.50 for both if Sizewell C proceeds) is demonstrably lower than all offshore wind entries in the CfD register  and at a predicted output of 26TWh/ annum secures around 25% of our current domestic electricity needs for over half a century beyond 2027 ish and 7% of total electricity needs.

No existing power station or wind turbine or solar panel or Tesla powerwall is capable of either by basic design or a life extension to do that. Our oldest coal fired station operated for 49 years but churned out loads of CO2 and paradoxically, huge amounts of radiation in the ash and dust, way beyond permitted releases from UK nuclear plants. How much dust and ash? Well look at Gale Common, right next to the M62, partway between the A1 and the A19. Relatively flat land for miles around, yet a huge hill complex, the combined dust and ash output of Ferrybridge C and Eggborough power stations for forty years. Huge quantities of coal burnt, huge quantities of electricity reliably generated for decades, making a far greater contributoin to the wealth of this country than renewables ever will, but ultimately both are gross polluters.

I've not always been a fan of nuclear, sometimes quite anti, often upset by the pain and suffering coal has required to get out of the ground. Regardless of the level of new build coal, which incidentally has decreased noticeably in the past couple of years, there is a huge amount of new nuclear build ongoing across the world. Yes it requires huge capital investment but it just sits there for year after year producing low cost reliable electricity with near zero carbon dioxide. Taking the option of wind turbines and solar balanced by gas results in 469g CO2 eq/kWh CO2 for the gas portion, 12g CO2 eq/kWH for the wind portion as against around 16g CO2 eq/kWh for an all nuclear option (median figure table A.II.4 page 189 IPCC 2011 Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation)

My first choice of nuclear reactor would not be the EPR as chosen by EdF for Hinkley but it will work, and be operational within a defined commissioning window, otherwise under the terms of the CfD we 'the UK' do not pay a penny, in additon we 'the UK' have an option to review after a number of years and there is an effective cap on returns to EdF. It's not the ideal solution of a UK wholly owned and financed national nuclear company but it's the best we can get at the moment. If we 'the UK' had not disposed of Westinghouse a decade ago things might have been different.

It is quite clear that local generation by solar or wind cannot demonstrably meet all local requirements across a typical day, at any point in the year without some storage requirements. When the demand is in an urban environment the deployment of sufficient generation massively exceeds the land / roofspace available.

Even if you could deploy sufficient renewable generation then storage using current or projected chemical methods cannot level the output of renewables to meet actual demand within the day, week or seasonally

The only sane, viable, long term solution to both meet our current needs and genuinely decarbonise our entire energy sector is nuclear fission. Fusion was 20 years away in the 1960's and as far away as that now.

For those that wish to mull over the facts of UK energy and the practicalities then I can recommend Without The Hot Air, a volume by the late, great Sir David Mackay, who from 2019-2014 was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change.

As for a 'rather backward understanding of the system' maybe I've just wasted many decades in the power generation and transmission business on four continents.

 

Edited By Martin 100 on 27/04/2017 14:14:48

[mark costello 1Participant @markcostello1]

Is there a chance that using all alternative methods would work? One thing might not be enough but add all We know now might work.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Excellent summary Martin, pity our politicians and civil servants won't read it, but even if they could they probably wouldn't understand.

I worked in the nuclear industry for nearly 40 years, some of it at Sellafield. Never gave me a moments concern. Friend of mine has just had radiation treatment for cancer. I'll bet he has had more dose than a Sellafield worker gets in his lifetime. Nuclear Fusion should be renamed Godot, it will come eventually, but no-one knows when.

My final point. Use of electricity for space heating except where it is part of a storage scheme should be banned. Just stop selling portable electric fires. Gas wall heaters are a lot more efficient.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

It would be wonderful to have a Time Machine and use it to look at energy costs in the next century..

My guess is that people in 2117 will be looking back at us amazed that energy used to be so cheap. I predict our grand-children will be paying much more for energy than we do. It may well be rationed; they will be worried that costs are ever rising, and they will be coping with energy used as a pawn in global politics.

Global warming is only one problem. Fossil fuels are going to run out, and there isn't a simple cheap replacement for them (yet). At the same time world demand for energy is rising: more people are burning it faster than ever before. Fossil carbon is also vital as a raw material, for example we rely very heavily on it for synthetics, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, pesticides and much else. At the present rate of consumption world reserves of coal will last about 200 years, but the effects of growing shortages will be seen much earlier than that unless a good alternative is found. (Oil and gas will run out before coal does.)

I think everything that can be done to extend the useful life of fossil fuels should be done. No one should expect renewables to replace fossil fuels outright, but they do usefully reduce the rate at which fossil fuels are burnt in power stations whenever the wind blows, or the sun shines. That's a good thing.

One solution might be to erect very large solar farms in the world's desert regions and connect them with a grid. The sun is always shining somewhere. Geothermal is a possibility: not cheap or easy but there's a lot of it. Fusion would be good but it's very hard to contain. I think we need to be much more open to nuclear power and accept that some of us will have to live on top of the waste.

The political and commercial effects of permanent carbon shortages can only be guessed at. The changes to the way we live could be radical, not necessarily dystopian, but perhaps as different as we are from the Brits living when Robert Jenkinson was Prime Minister. (He was in charge when the British Army burnt down the White House. )

Last thought, it may turn out that it wasn't too smart for the UK to have divorced Europe when 30% of the world's coal reserves are in Germany and Poland. No need to worry though, we'll all be dead by 2113 whatever happens!

Cheers,

Dave

PS. I should be fixing a scary plumbing crisis, not blathering on my digital soapbox.

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

Apart from the Fukushima issues it's the cleanup costs for nuclear which make it a bad option

Sellafield cleanup 53 billion…

No wait it's 70 billion…

Probably at 100 billion by now, and for what? Nothing, absolutely nothing

How many windmills can you get for 100 billion quid?

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by duncan webster on 27/04/2017 14:29:34:

Use of electricity for space heating except where it is part of a storage scheme should be banned. Just stop selling portable electric fires. Gas wall heaters are a lot more efficient.

Electricity can be used much more efficiently for space heating. Last year I had our old reversible air conditioning system replaced with a modern inverter controlled system. The new system has a SEER (seasonal energy efficiency ratio) of 4.6 for heating. In other words, averaged over the year, for every kWh consumed the heat it adds to the house is 4.6 kWh. My electricity bill for the year has reduced by 25%. Admittedly I have a wood burner to supplement it but I hardly used it this winter.

An even better domestic heating system is to use a heat pump to extract geothermal energy. Rather expensive at present but costs are falling.

Russell

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 27/04/2017 15:22:28

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

How does hydrogen stack up as an energy storage solution? It also strikes me as odd that the later hydrogen vehicles use the H2 in fuel cells rather than straight combustion..

[Martin 100Participant @martin100]

Posted by Ady1 on 27/04/2017 15:03:41:

and for what? Nothing, absolutely nothing

How many windmills can you get for 100 billion quid?

From

https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=GB

65149.00 GWh of generation for 2016

To take just the UK reactors still operational across their lifetimes (and ignoring the enormous contribution by the MAGNOX reactors)

Dungeness B1 89.36TWh

Dungeness B2 93.44 TW.h

Hartlepool 1 102.26 TWh

Hartlepool 2 97.68 TWh
Heysham A1 97.49 TWh
Heysham A2 92.86 TWh
Heysham B1 116.61 TWh
Heysham B2 111.90 TWh
Hinkley Point B1 135.46 TWh
Hinkley Point B2 132.33 TWh
Hunterston B1 136.13 TWh
Hunterston B2 130.22 TWh
Sizewell B 164.56 TWh
Torness 1 110.02 TWh
Torness 2 107.68 TWh

A total of 1718 TWh

That's about 170 billion quids worth of electricity at 10p a unit, five years worth 100% continual supply at the current rate of 350TWh per annum

Given the generation mix the UK would otherwise have used, the operation of those reactors has directly avoided the release of around 1700 trillion kilos of CO2 into the atmosphere that would have been produced by the equivalent coal fired generation (using the IPCC WG III median g CO2 eq/kWh) Plus the avoided Sulphur Dioxide, Nitrous Oxides, and particulates and millions of tonnes of very low level radioactive waste produced by every coal fired power station.

The savings in human life are also significant too

**LINK**

How many windmills for 100 billion quid?

About 30000 rated at 2.5MW. Lets assume 75GW nameplate capacity, that's some six times what we have now onshore and offshore. Site them all optimally offshore and you have a capacity factor of around 38% per annum, or 250TWh per annum of generation (theoretically 70% of our annual electricity demand) but with absolutely no degree of dispatchabity

Now lets shut all those dirty power stations down because they are no longer needed and in any case the operators cannot make any money to justify their operation.

You need to meet 53GW of demand at the winter peak and the availability factor for wind at that time is assumed to be 21% based on historical records.

The result? A high probability of electricity supply for less than 2 hours per day around the winter peak

Significant periods when supply fails throughout the year

Significant periods overnight when supply is ahead of demand and with no means of storing any excess

Clearly not a winning idea on how to spend 100 billion quid and nowhere near enough to keep the lights on across the UK

Edited By Martin 100 on 27/04/2017 16:05:57

[Geoff TheasbyParticipant @geofftheasby]

Martin, Duncan, et al, good stuff, thank you. The cost of installed PV and wind power is falling, and at the same time their efficiency is rising. 10 plus years ago, solar panels cost 4 times more than now and the subsidies are falling too. Insulation can be fitted easily at any time to a house for very little, my wife and I insulated our loft by ourselves in half a day. The temperature up there on a cold, or hot day is vastly different from the rooms below. 12 inches of fibreglass matting.. Then the hot water tank, underfloor insulation downstairs, double glazing now 20 years old and still OK, low energy lighting, A-rated tv, fridge etc, it all helps. Then if solar panels were fitted to all housing with suitable roofs, including all those vast sheds around every ring road, and every building was insulated from new to Scandinavian standards, we would be getting somewhere. We would also be wise to unplug all those mobile phone chargers, power supplies for games machines, those little red lights on everything, if poss, and even not leaving your computers, tvs etc.on standby all night… If you live off-grid this becomes very important!

Geoff

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by pgk pgk on 27/04/2017 15:57:18:

….

It also strikes me as odd that the later hydrogen vehicles use the H2 in fuel cells rather than straight combustion..

Me too but apparently a Hydrogen Fuel Cell is 2-3 times more efficient than internal combustion.

No explanation in the article I read but I guess one reason might be that IC engines run more-or-less continually, wasting energy at traffic lights and so forth, while a Fuel Cell only uses Hydrogen when needed.

Although the Fuel Cell is much more efficient than all IC engines, the total cost of Hydrogen is more expensive. Shades of the old Newcomen Engines which survived in Collieries long after the arrival of far more efficient Watt Engines because the Newcomen engines worked on 'free' waste coal.

There's reason for optimism because Hydrogen technology is getting cheaper. There are still lots of problems though.

Dave

[MWParticipant @mw27036]

It is sad to see coal disappear but I suspect the future will be largely nuclear, the energy generation is just extraordinary, this comparison of energy sources was in E.P.E magazine;

Lead acid battery; 0.17MJ/kg

Alkaline Battery; 0.5MJ/kg

Lith-Ion Battery; 0.875MJ/kg

Wood; 16MJ/kg

Petrol; 46MJ/kg

Hydrogen 142MJ/kg

Uranium in a breeder reactor; 80,000,000MJ/kg

Like others have said, to have the entirety of the countries ever growing guzzle of energy sufficiently met, something has to give and it can't be mile after mile of windfarms and solar panels. For the mean time, we can focus our efforts on how to make nuclear generation as safe as possible and, for the whole reason why Sellafield exists, what to do with all the spent rods. 

I agree with Duncan W's comment about electric oil heaters, woefully inefficient compared to gas. 

Michael W

Edited By Michael-w on 27/04/2017 18:18:12

[JourneymanParticipant @journeyman]

Posted by Michael-w on 27/04/2017 18:06:38:

I agree with Duncan W's comment about electric oil heaters, woefully inefficient compared to gas.

Michael W

True but many parts of the UK have no easy access to gas except by using bottled LPG which is definitely not cheap. If you have to use electricity for heating then, as mentioned above, the best current system is probably by means of a heat pump. Even thought the installation costs are high.

John

[Bill Davies 2Participant @billdavies2]

For a readable review of our energy alternatives, can I recommend David Mckay's website and book (which can be downloaded free as a pdf):

**LINK**

It comes with plenty of numbers for those of us who like that kind of thing, but is very readable without chasing down the calculations. Sadly, the author died all too prematurely last year.

Bill

[HacksawParticipant @hacksaw]

Sleepless nights worrying about coke supply for my forge now …..!!

Why is my coke as expensive as coal when it's just secondhand leftovers from a power station ?

[HacksawParticipant @hacksaw]

Sleepless nights worrying about coke supply for my forge now …..!!

Why is my coke as expensive as coal when it's just secondhand leftovers from a power station ?

[HacksawParticipant @hacksaw]

In the future…. will a forge fire be positive and negative copper terminals.. and you'd short the iron to get it hot? No wasted energy ,unlike having a fire burning all day… ?

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Posted by Geoff Theasby on 27/04/2017 16:47:20:

….The cost of installed PV and wind power is falling, and at the same time their efficiency is rising. ……..

Geoff

It doesn't matter how cheap they are, or how efficient, if it's dark and the wind isn't blowing they don't work.

[MWParticipant @mw27036]

One development that seems to have gone amiss in our musings is that countries tend to sell their energy to other ones now, French power plants meet some of the U.K's demand if needed. Russia sells gas to other countries through a vast network of pipelines. Mexico also sells some power north to the U.S.

If i'm to take a punt at what might happen, since china is apparently erecting coal power plants like they're going out of fashion, is they might find they have far more energy than they're actually using, what to do, other than sell to others? We may end up buying Chinese power if they can find a way to export it..

Sadly though, politics will probably get in the way of it.

Michael W

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

If the system was less partisan we could do a lot more with renewables,

Scotland and Ireland can produce vast amounts of wind energy but Whitehall would lay an egg if things started going seriously in that direction

The Scandahooligans are doing better with inter nation co-operation stuff

[nigel jones 5Participant @nigeljones5]

There are places on earth where the sun shines brightly all day every day, tides are not going away and thus there is and always will be a constant opportunity for very cheap power, we just heed to get it sorted out and put in place.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Surely they could power Denmark on methane from pig flatulence alone

Neil

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

The argument concerning low night time use is a bit of a fallacy. Once all cars lorries buses and whatever else become all-electric/battery powered then the whole lot will need to be recharged overnight, plus spare batteries for swapping during the day for heavy users

I like the sound of hydrogen cells, but know nothing of the detail

[Martin 100Participant @martin100]

What that glossy story about the Danes doesn't tell you is they regularly dump excess wind energy to the Norwegians at zero or negative cost, who then throttle their hydro generation, only for the Danes to buy energy back at full wholesale price later in the day. They also regularly dump excess energy at zero or negative cost into the German grid system, where there is already an excess from their own offshore wind turbines and with an ongoing lack of North-South transfer capacity within Germany to the major load centres in the south, which then causes the Germans to spill excess energy to the Poles and the Czechs, causing overload problems on their own grids that has led to them installing quadrature booster devices to restrict and control power flow through their networks. The Germans also have significant problems with too much solar PV so the wholesale price regularly goes negative, with solar plant constrained off the system to prevent local overvoltage and ultimately total system collapse.

Denmark has interconnectors to Sweden, Germany and Norway, but It is actually less interconnected in energy transfer terms than either Scotland, the West Midlands, North West England, Yorkshire or the East Midlands. Their total electricity market annually is around 10% of that of the UK. (30TWh vs 350TWh) That such a tiny country (Population similar to either Scotland, Yorkshire or the West Midlands) could 'for one day' generate 140% of their requirements from wind turbines is no real surprise, all it needs is a lack of conventional generation online (for district heating) an overdeployment of wind generation and a suitable weather system.

The UK has interconnectors to France (the first one was built in 1961) The replacement rated at 2GW was built in the early 1980's, with 1GW to the Netherlands, 500MW to the Repubic of Ireland 500MW and 250MW to Northern Ireland.

In addition we have an undersea 2.2GW HVDC interconnector from Hunterston to Deeside about to go live later this year, plus 3.5GW of multiple onshore interconnector capacity to Scotland, with significant onshore transmission upgrades in Scotland such as the Beauly-Denny 400kV circuits specifically built and upgraded to cope with Scottish renewables.

There are also additonal interconnectors to France, Norway and Iceland either already in build (Norway @ 1.4GW scheduled for commmsioning in 2021) or in advanced planning / seabed survey stage.

Also despite all the wind turbines in Denmark their CO2 emissions per capita are higher than the UK 6.51 tonnes vs 6.16 tonnes in 2015 despite starting at around the same level in 2005.

Their electricity prices for domestic consumers are also the highest in Europe and 40% higher than the UK

But when it's dark and not windy anything but renewables is what you require. Just over a week ago a Reactor was taken offline at Torness after 397 days continuous operation, it's now back in service with the next planned shutdown planned for September 2018, 600+MW 24/7/365, In excess of 5TWh per annum per reactor of very low carbon electricity and genuinely keeping the lights on, meanwhile circa 10GW of grid connected wind generation is right now delivering just 645MW and meeting just 1.8% of demand.

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by Journeyman on 27/04/2017 18:52:33:as mentioned above, the best current system is probably by means of a heat pump. Even thought the installation costs are high.

John

My reversible air conditioning system cost €3k including installation. That's for 5.6 kW total heating capacity (from 1.2 kW of electrical input) and consisted of a single outdoor unit and two indoor units. I think that compares favourably with other heating systems. Of course for a geothermal heat pump you are looking at a much higher cost.

Resulting carbon emissions are very low as only about 8% of our electricity generation is from fossil fuel.

Russell.

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 28/04/2017 11:04:05

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 28/04/2017 11:06:02

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

I hada 6kw and a 3kw reversible aircon put in here a couple fo years ago and questioned the fitter over how thin the power cable was and was stunned by the low current draw he demonstrated.

reading further it seems most H2 is currently from fossil sources. logically if costings permit then hydrolysis from spare renewable capacity could be a way to go. As to the sun not shining all the time.. that rather depends where you are.. it's always daytime somewhere. If the infrastructure as there for transfer of power.. cables, pipes, bottled H2 then again logic suggests solar power from deserts and siting tidal or wind where it's at its height..

What concerns me most about solar is when all those panels need recycling.

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