> And electricity only accounts for 18% of the UK's total power needs. There are many demands for energy which electricity is not meeting, such as heating our homes, manufacturing and transport.
Currently the majority of UK homes use gas for their heating
Perhaps we should start talking about what % of “energy” comes from renewables? Probably far more difficult to calculate and we’ll never hit 100% I guess?
One complication is that burning fuel is so much less efficient than electrical usage If you ignore that, then it radically changes the impression you get from these stats.
The technical terms are "primary energy" (the amount of energy you put in as fuel) and "final energy" the actual useful stuff you want done.
Cars moving to EV will reduce the need for "primary energy" by about 4x if the useful final energy remains flat. Similar for heat pumps for home heating.
While that's true you do need to take into account the limited efficiency of power plants as well, especially when it comes to heating.
Simply burning gas to generate heat is basically 100% efficient, if you convert it to electricity first you'd need a COP of at least 1.7 to recover the energy lost while generating the electricity.
With the most common high-temperature hydronic heating, it's closer to 80% efficiency when running steady-state, and lower than that as the duty cycle decreases (if the system is oversized or for the 99% of the time you're not at the design temp). The remaining energy escapes as hot, uncondensed flue gases. Modulating/condensing boilers can get up to like 95% if you're running with ~100-120F water temperatures, but at that point you can also readily run with an air-to-water heat pump.
A whole lot of other electricity demands drop massively at night, so while it needs to be planned for, the coldest nighttime period is also the time the electricity grid currently sees the lowest demand.
Not as cold as the Nordics, sure, but depending on cycles, it can drop a few degrees below freezing between November - March
The main issue is that homes were designed to trap and keep heat in, rather than true insulation, which means that as summers get warmer, our homes turn into ovens, with no way to cool them down properly. Case in point last summer with UK temps hitting 40C and above for a few weeks.
Government are trying to kill off the old gas boilers though, with heat pumps being pushed very heavily, not sure if they're enforcing it yet or not though. Apparently they're also looking at switching out natural gas for a hydrogen mix, but that means having to rework a lot of the piping/valves as hydrogen needs much higher standards than currently applied.
Yeah, had to get clued up on this for new house in London. A few points:
1. It is unlikely that hydrogen will be pushed heavily by the UK gov because of the expensive pipe rework. The reason they're pushing hard for heat pumps is because of the Glasgow Climate Pact; they're on the hook to reduce carbon emissions or pay heavy fines. To that extent, subsidising heat pumps becomes financially less unviable for them than doing nothing.
2. Regarding the heat in summer; the houses insulate well but don't do much to prevent heat coming in from the windows during summer. There are some pretty useful half-fixes; mvhrs+insulation, or recessed windows/overhangs/sunshades massively aid this. For those who rent that's not much help though :(
With the high summer temperatures (likely to rise further with climate change), I wonder why more people aren't fitting forced air heating/cooling. That would kill two birds with one stone. Even just a simple mini-split system.
The British seems to like to suffer in the heat. Every summer colleagues laugh at me for having AC units, and every summer they start loudly complaining about how hot it is a week or two later.
Being from Norway but living in the UK: The average UK house is not built for UK temperatures... Insulation here is a bad joke, at least in older housing.
In practice or is that what the manufacturers claim?
Either way you should take into account you lose about 40% of that by simply converting the fuel to electricity, which is kind of the opposite of what happens when moving from combustion engines to electromechanical engines.
Depends on operating regime, but newly installed pumps typically are used in a way that gets close to 3.
You can generate electricity with a gas power plant at 50%, use that to operate heat pumps, and you will warm your house more than directly burning the gas.
Or put another way, in a gas dominated grid, switching from gas heating to heat pumps saves carbon gas emissions.
> you lose about 40% of that by simply converting the fuel to electricity
while that is true, it is only a stepping stone towards generating electricity renewably (let's say wind or solar).
The consumer ultimately decides the method (via market forces), and they are the easiest to convert first. If the demand for gas heating drops because of electrification, gas demand would fall (but the cost of extraction remains the same/similar), and therefore, makes electricity cheaper and cheaper.
The losses from current electricity conversion from gas at the plant is merely a short term loss for a better long term 'future', and i would consider it a cost of electrification.
Storage is another one. As is multiplicity of energy inputs.
I still have no idea why nobody uses heat reservoirs for shower hot water, like they do in the Mediterranean. (it's not a sun coverage problem, because contrary to popular anecdotes, the UK actually gets quite decent sun coverage a lot of the time)
That's not obvious at all. At the time that the UK switched to gas, Norway was pushing resistive electrical heating and not heat pumps - and that only worked for them because nearly all of their electricity came from hydroelectric generation. The push for heat pumps is much more recent, with only a few thousand households in Norway having heat pumps as recently as 2005. The UK doesn't have the geography for that kind of large-scale hydroelectric, and there's a huge efficiency and equipment cost to using resistive electric heating rather than burning fossil fuels directly when your electricity has to be generated from fossil fuels. Also, the coal that cheap natural gas largely replaced in the UK was directly killing a bunch of people by causing pretty nasty pollution.
In general, a lot of comparisons with other countries that get published in the British press are like this - they ignore important differences between the UK and those countries or problems and costs associated with what they're doing because the goal is to make it seem like there were easy options that the UK missed out on because our government is evil, not to actually help people understand the world.
The UK had its phase of pushing resistive heating in the 1970s. For a while I had a flat in London that had storage heaters fitted in that period. They would heat up a kind of brick overnight using the off peak 'Economy 7' cheaper rate then emit heat over the day while I was out at work.
Though of course, sometimes there are easy options that the UK missed out on because they are inept and apathetic, which would vindicate some of those comparisons to some extent.
What is a heat reservoir for the shower, and what does it have to do with the sun? I'm Googling the term and all I'm finding is standard hot water storage tanks [1].
Now I am indeed curious what the minimum amount of sunlight required is. I'm sure the angle of the sun is just as important as the duration, on top of weather and seasons and temperatures.
I heard (I know, I know) that solar hot water didn't count towards Kyoto Protocol "credits" so it wasn't promoted, in favour of solar photovoltaic, which did.
Wind and solar need back up yes - but it doesn't have to be from fossil fuel. Currently that is often the cheapest and quickest - but batteries and other energy storage are fast becoming economical. We are already using less non-renewables each year.
Fast becoming economical? How fast? Current cost for battery storage I've seen quoted (open to correction) is around $600K per MWh. For every MW of wind or solar power that would be $120 million. Wind farms at around $1.5 million per MW ie., around 80 times that. And are there that numbers of batteries available? Currently dependent on availability of cobalt, lithium,manganese and nickel with China as the main supplier of these and world’s largest producer of graphite, the primary anode material for Li-ion batteries.
Batteries are currently following their own version of Moore's law, though they double in quality (or halve in price) every 48 instead of every 18 months. Of course, that isn't a trend that can continue forever, but it doesn't need too many more iterations to be the only game in town.
"$600K per MWh" sounds like the cost per peak (initial) storage capacity; as the batteries can be recharged something like six thousand times before wearing down to half capacity, that's more like adding $100 per MWh ($0.1/kWh) if you throw them out at that point or $50 per MWh (5¢/kWh) if they keep wearing down at the same rate until they're negligible.
> And are there that numbers of batteries available
Not yet — but there are enough people investing in each stage of mining, processing, and making battery factories, that this is probably not going to be an issue.
> Currently dependent on availability of cobalt, lithium,manganese and nickel with China as the main supplier of these and world’s largest producer of graphite, the primary anode material for Li-ion batteries.
Technically, I think, yes; but that's just where we are today rather than a fundamental property of world geography.
Batteries are much cheaper today than they were yesterday, and it’s a clear push downward over time.
China being the “main supplier” has more to do with them undercutting everyone else in refining by not paying attention enough to their environment, it isn’t sustainable. All of these raw materials have ample reserves outside of China. Some of battery economy comes from that, but not most of it.
There are other ways to store energy than batteries. The Pacific Northwest and even California has a lot of pumped storage hydro capacity. Hydro is a renewable that can be used on demand, and can be combined with other renewables to move water back up to reservoirs.
China is world leading on renewable production and installation, EVs and EV busses, Lithium, LFP and Sodium battery production, Hydro, HVDC, nuclear, high speed rail and a bunch of other stuff.
It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.
The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
> It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.
China still produces plenty of coal, so I'm not sure what your point is. I guess you mean oil, and their move into EVs totally makes sense from that context even if they can get it cheaply from Iran and Russia these days.
> The crackdown in Yichun, Jiangxi province, follows a local lithium frenzy over the past year as miners raced to feed rampant demand for the battery material — and to benefit from record global prices. Now, they’re grappling with a close-up inspection by environment officials sent from Beijing.
You can tour the Chinese countryside and find tons of places like this.
> The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
The west could not keep up Chinese refiners because Chinese refiners have little regard for their environment. As the Chinese central government cracks down and the west worries more about their resource security, the Chinese will simply lose that advantage.
pumped storage hydro, while really cool, are absolutely massive and complicated multibillion dollar infrastructure projects (which California lately has not been particularly famous for)
They were built decades ago, so not a big problem now. The west has lots of places to build these things, it doesn't work out east nor probably in the UK outside of maybe Scotland.
I think you are assuming that turbines would be paired with a certain number of batteries and taken together that would provide continuous power. But that is just not how a grid works or how the economics work. Battery storage is economical because you can buy cheap and sell high. And a system with high renewables penetration will see some very high prices for a few hours or days per month and cheap prices the rest of the time. That is ideal for battery storage, particularly as renewables gets cheaper.
Even at a domestic scale you can install solar and batteries for your household/heating/car usage -- assuming you have the roof space -- be self sufficent 10 months a year, and have a payack time of about 12 years last time I looked.
The other 2 months a year sure, you've got either grid power or an off grid oil/gas generator.
Snowy 2 is $6 billion for 350GWh, so $17k per MWh.
At this point somebody usually argues that you can only do that in Australia and the geography for pumped storage is super rare (I call it the "theres a shortage of up" fallacy), and I have to cite the same study proving that it's actually not.
I would go the contrarian way and suggest Snowy 2 is one of several examples that demonstrate that spending the same amount of money on more renewable generation and some battery storage would provide more reliable power for less money.
Which makes the geography question moot. But most people's intuitions on renewables/battery are years out of date so it's confusing to respond to their sarcastic "are we just going to build lots of batteries, LOL" with "actually yes that's going to be sensible for 80% of the world's population".
edit: long article comparing Snowy to more solar plus batteries:
That's a weird article. It simultaneously argues that between batteries and snowy 2 there is no clear winner, that snowy 2 is a white elephant and that:
>Hornsdale Power Reserve: $690 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power will be $5,000, which is 5.6 times more than Hornsdale. But its cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity is much lower no matter if you think $20, $29, or $250 is appropriate.
In other words in terms of storing a large volume of energy, cheaply, at high efficiency, pumped storage blows everything else out of the metaphorical water - between 3x and 34.5x cheaper!
I would say that batteries and large scale pumped storage complement each other. I don't agree that Australia will regret building it.
That article is completely mad. But it does admit the following:
The main drawbacks [of battery storage] are: At the moment, it has a much higher cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. Much shorter lifespan.
If we consider Snowy Hydro 2’s maximum possible energy storage capacity, it comes to only $20 to $29 per kilowatt-hour
$5,000 [buys] 5.16 kilowatt-hours of Hornsdale storage
That is, Snowy Hydro is an order of magnitude cheaper for storage.
The article continuously harps on about kW comparisons, and ignores comparing kWh storage: foolish for an article supposedly about electricity storage. For example the article makes the inane point: “If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power output comes to… $5,000 per kilowatt. That’s not cheap. Gas generation normally comes to under $1,000 per kilowatt.”, and again “Snowy 2 Vs. Hornsdale: Assuming Snowy Hydro 2 costs $5,000 per kilowatt of power output, for that cost, we could instead buy . . .”.
It's not really a problem, even just moving all fossil fuels from heating and transport and using it in electrical generation gets you a 4x gain, from which you lose about 50-60% when turning it to electricity, so still ahead by about 2x even before you start adding in the wind and solar.
Plus we already built all that storage for gas and oil, might as well use it as part of the transition.
Well, the storage bit we are a bit bad at, the Tories didn't renew one of the biggest facilities after it closed down which was inconvenient during the Russia thing.
That gas storage facility got closed down because it didn't make economic sense to operate any more - the big summer-winter price swings that made it viable had ceased to exist (possibly because more widespread use of gas for electricity generation caused more gas usage in summer, I'm not sure) and it had physical limitations on how fast gas could be injected and extracted that meant smoothing over those seasonal changes was all it was really useful for. It still didn't even make sense during the whole Russia thing.
Over in mainland Europe, gas storage was vital to dealing with Russia cutting off supplies because their gas infrastructure was physically incapable of importing gas from non-Russian sources fast enough to keep up with winter demand (if I remember rightly, even if they cut back massively on non-essential gas usage). So they basically needed full gas storage just to survive the winter, and of course Russia had made sure it was emptied out the winter before. The UK didn't have this limitation. This need to fill gas storage caused huge problems - global gas demand was already quite high and it takes a long time for supplies to be redirected and high-energy industries to reduce usage, so prices spiked sky-high at first.
As a result, mainland Europe ended up filling its gas storage at close to the all-time-high price and emptying it out when prices were much lower, effectively buying high and selling low funded by extra charges on people's energy bills with the high prices being more or less a direct consequence of the fact that they couldn't just put off buying their gas until winter. If the UK government had done the same, the press here would never have shut up about how much money they "wasted" on it.
Also our sources of gas are relatively diverse and secure compared to some main land countries. The UK maintained supply just fine, the problem was price. And arguably that had more to do with lack of nuclear capacity in France.
Yeah, another story covering this had interconnects as just below gas in rank order of usage. Also, despite that large import, UK was a net exporter for the first time in a while last year since France was having issues with its nuclear fleet.
We need to get more interconnects between Scotland and England.
They are building them, but in the sea which could be interesting with an annoyed Russia.
Wind farms were built at sea, on the surface because of nimbyism on land, but being ever cynical I think the real reason was to push the cost and difficulty up giving oil companies more time.
Later, during Liz Truss's short and disasterous tenure, just as solar panels were getting very cheap, even very low quality farm land was reclassified as a strategic asset for food to be grown on and no solar.
In what was possibly a distraction wind was now to be allowed on land (of course it's much less convenient to put up a wind turbine than to get some very cheap solar panels and that's before all the nimby groups, some of which get dark money funding).
Quote: Every year, the United Kingdom loses a share of generated electricity through transmission. In 2021, transmission losses amounted to around 25 terawatt-hours, or approximately nine percent of the electricity supplied in the UK that year. Transmission losses stood above 30 terawatt-hours in the early 2000's.
Yes it does. A big gas plant is say about 44% efficient (i.e. 56% lost as heat) so 10% of that electricity getting lost in wires takes you down to 40% of the original input energy.
Heat pumps don't qualify for EU Renewable heat incentives if they get less than 2.5 SFP (COP averaged over the year's seasons).
You're possibly thinking of an Open Cycle gas turbine, where we burn gas, it spins the turbine, and the hot exhaust is lost energy. The UK has a negligible amount of this in electricity production and obviously with higher fuel prices there's ever less reason to use that small capacity. The 30GW or so gas turbine electricity in the UK is Combined Cycle, so the exhaust heat runs a secondary steam turbine bringing them up past 50% efficiency.
With what argument? Parent post was talking about measuring energy needs and how efficiency of consumption works, not wind and solar. Did you mean to reply to a different post?
Looking at the report that that was based on (page xiv on https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... ), it looks like the efficient stoves are at about 1/15-1/10 the open fire amount. Those “450x” numbers are compared to methane, which is close to zero particulate, so it’s a little misleading. But burning methane means you’re adding prehistoric carbon to the atmosphere.
I’m guessing that if all the open fires were instead “low particulate” stoves, then it wouldn’t be a concern compared to PM2.5 generation from vehicles.
I don’t see a perfect here until we all have heat pumps driven by nuclear.
Exhaust particulate per mile has plummeted over the past couple of decades! By comparison, EPA stoves put out a couple grams of particulate per hour.
But, it seems like it's not apples to apples, because brake dust is metal dust, whereas wood smoke tends to be mostly organic compounds. Maybe the body is better at dealing with organic wood smoke compounds? We've certainly been heavily exposed over many generations.
I am curious if wood-burning technology would be a suitable solution for rural settings where lower population density means particulates and smog are a lesser concern. Pellet stoves for heating, wood-gas for long-ranged vehicles. But while trees are a renewable fuel, they still mean converting carbon from a sequestered place (a tree) into being released into the air.
It might be useful to keep in mind that culling trees means that a forest that was in steady state and pulling very little net carbon can go back into more active growth. But I suppose that the total carbon sequestered would be less with a decrease in the average age of the trees.
Tree starts as a seed. Grows up and sequesters X tons of carbon.
Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon.
Tree is re-planted, grows up, sequesters X tons of carbon.
Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon.
If everything in the world right now was wood powered, we would not have a global warming problem. We would have massive tree farms sequestering the same amount of carbon we are releasing. (We might have a soot and particle problem, but that's another story).
The problem with oil and coal, is we have no way to make more. We burn oil and release carbon.. how are we making more oil and pumping back underground to sequester that carbon?
Very true, but we likely couldn't have that amount of farmland for what we currently just pull out of earth with millions of years of sequestring.. not sure if getting rid of most of the livestock needs would free enough ("Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories").. are there any calculations how many tree farms we'd need besides a huge solar/wind/geothermal mix?
When it comes to usage in heating, burning fuel is as efficient as it gets. All the chemical energy (available in that oxidation reaction) is converted to heat. Electricity involves more overheads in generation and transmission.
Burning fuel is pretty efficient, until you realise that heat pumps have an efficiency greater than 1. So a heat pump driven by electricity uses less energy than burning fuel in a boiler. If the electricity is renewable, so much the better.
Some of that heat goes up the chimney. A good quality log burner, used correctly (and I believe that most people who use log burners have no effing clue how to do so) is at best 60-80% efficient.
Plus you have to account for the energy used to grow, harvest, season & transport the wood, even before you throw 20-40% of it away when you actually burn the damn stuff!
Same principle just with a different efficiency number. I doubt any but a fraction of combi boilers are 98% efficient: most people run them too hot, so they aren't able to recover sufficient energy to reach that goal. But in any case, you now have to account for installing and maintaining the gas network, refining the oil into gas, shipping the oil to the refinery, extracting the oil in the first place, exploring for the oil in the first place, and so on.
It's far more efficient to burn that fuel to move existing energy from one place (outside) to another (inside)... you can turn 1J of fuel into 4J of heating if you're lucky!
Umm, no. I stand by it, although heat pumps hadn’t occurred to me.
But a typical electric heater is probably not going to match the efficiency of a natural gas heater. It matters how much energy is lost in generation and transmission versus extraction and transmission though.
Also I don’t care for your comment. I think if we met in real life, we would not be friends.
No need to guess... If you watch about any talk on climate change mitigation it will start with a chart that shows which sectors use which amount of energy.
It's literally the introduction of the IPCC Report WG3 Report on energy:
Decarbonization of energy use in different sectors will require different technologies, but electricity is key. ENTSOE expects the amount of energy use that is directly electric to rise to up to 50% by 2050 for Europe:
We are talking so much about decarbonizing the electric grid because that's the easy part, but also because its the foundation for what must come afterwards.
Quite. I've tired of pointing out to overly-optimistic responses on the internet about how well countries are doing in this regard, when if you look at the overall energy usage pie-chart, there's a big chunk covering industry and transportation that's a looong way off yet from being covered by renewables.
Not that I wish to be pessimistic, rather realistic.
If electricity prices stay low other forms of energy will migrate.
Already people in the UK are hooking up electric cars and heat pumps to automated tariffs that charge/heat depending on the availability of cheap power (i.e. wind/sun availability).
The important thing is to double down on what is already working.
I heard, just the other day, about someone (in the UK) using their Tesla to make money by buying cheap (night-time) power and selling it back during high-rate times, and I was moved to wonder... Does this "profit" making scheme still work when you take into account the lifespan of the Tesla's batteries -- I'd guess they're good for something like 4000 cycles, and then you're facing the cost of replacement. I have my doubts whether it really works out, but lack the data.
I don't have the numbers with me, but I've seen convincing discussions that it can work with some caveats. The main issue being that spot prices are extremely volatile, so it's possible for a player at the utility space to get very high prices for electricity for very short times. But daytime-pricing schemes, while they follow the general trends of this volatility, insulate the consumer from the worst of this volatility enough that simply arbitraging the difference probably won't pay for the wear on a Tesla. But a fleet of Teslas paying the same rates as the utilities could make it a profitable enterprise.
Reading between the lines of Tesla investor meetings it sounds as though they have the software but haven't implemented it because it would hurt their brand as a luxury good.
Yes, if it gets cheaper people will migrate to electricity and then wind will not be able to be the "main" source of electricity anymore. They'll have to burn more coal or gas. Yay?
But the headline is very misleading. The article says a third of their electricity comes from wind. 1/3 is not what came to my mind when I read, "main source of electricity." And now knowing that electricity is only 18% of their total energy, that means wind isn't really doing much at all for them. So you can't actually look at this and say, "wow, the main source of electricity! Climate change is nearly conquered! We just need more a few more windmills!" Like many will think when they read this headline.
France got a 40 year head start. They werent even aiming to decarbonize their electricity, it was a side effect of chasing energy independence during the oil crisis.
It was the way to go in 1970.
People think nuclear isnt the way to go now because it's eye wateringly expensive. EDF's bankruptcy and the rapidly exploding costs and risks of dealing with France's aging plants confirms this. In spite of still spending hand over fist, the % of nuclear power is in decline in France (theyre officially hoping solar and wind can fill in the gaps).
It should also be noted that the French government went out of its way to gut the nuclear ecosystem for electoral reasons (F. Hollande hoping to get the Green vote some 15 years ago). Only recently did they realize that we don't have nearly enough renewables and that, yes, if you don't maintain your plants, they do tend to degrade rather quickly. And presenting the sector as a dead-end, of course they're now missing qualified people to do the maintenace and the design of new plants.
This is in additation to the weird scheme forcing EDF to sell cheap energy to their competitors.
I always hear it's so expensive, but compared to what? Just continuing to burn fossil fuels?
Costs I see to solar and wind that I rarely see anyone mention are:
What happens when you cover large deaths of land with solar and windmills? What does that do to the micro climates of those areas and what affects will that have on the global climate? What does that do to the wildlife (both plant and animal) long term?
What are the true costs of the mines and manufacturing and transportation needed to build and maintain all of that?
I grew up near hydroelectric dams and when I was young they were hailed as free renewable energy. By the time I hit highschool they were demonized for forever changing the river's ecosystem and nearly driving certain fish species to extinction. How does wind and solar not end up the same?
In fact, I've seen the "solar and wind cover lots of land" in every single post about energy that comes on HN or Reddit.
The answer the "compared to what?" is everything. It is clean, continuous, it's compact and other benefits. But it's expensive. You need over 30 years (being optimist) to break even. You need government financial support because no bank would finance that. That's the reason only countries like France or China build them: the costs are partially hidden in the country budgets or public owned corporations balances.
About hydro, that was a "unknown unknown" paraprhasing Rumsfeld. You can't avoid what currently seems our best bet to our current knowledge (wind and solar) because maybe there's an unknown unknown that could bit us hard in 40 years.
The science of understanding environmental impact has improved hugely. We can actually know pretty well the answer to those kind of questions. And often the impact will be less damaging to the environment than what it is replacing (such as farmland).
But how many heat their homes with electricity? Many households in France (and the UK and elsewhere) are heating their homes with gas and the same goes for cooking. The share of electricity of the total energy consumption is also important to consider.
That is the challenge; we often have a few weeks with low wind so need those fossil fuel generation to fill the hole. And adding more turbines doesn't help the bad cases much.
Not always. Often, but not always, and that's the problem. This afternoon for example, even off the East Coast of Scotland the wind was about as brisk as a stroll with your elderly grandmother. If you've got 10GW of wind turbines, but they're running at 5% output, that's 500MW, which isn't nothing but it's not even enough for Scotland.
Yes grid.iamkate.com is brilliant, and it has good insights into costs. However, I just like the 90s skeuomorphic design of gridwatch.templar.co.uk, makes me think of simpler times.
It's almost entirely static (or at least server rendered) even all the SVG graphs. I'm going to take punt and say it's a static pre-rendered flat file based on the response time.
The UK is doing surprisingly well for offshore wind, with 7/10 of the largest offshore wind installations in the world being here. We’re terrible for onshore though
We've done a particularly good job of pivoting our off shore engineering expertise from north see oil to offshore wind. I see that as a massive success in reusing expertise in an old industry in a new one.
When it comes to onshore, as a relatively densely populated island it can be politicly difficult to build large wind farms anywhere but in Scotland. Add to that the reasonable argument that offshore wind is more consistent and our offshore engineering expertise, it's quick to reach the conclusion we should be (almost) all in on offshore wind.
What I heard is that it wasn't actually a good fit for oil companies as they tend to focus on building one-off installations. Renewables is more similar to serial production where you have to do the same thing many times. Which is a good fit for dredging companies or cable layers. My guess is that we just had a lot of coast and shallow waters.
Considering UK is an island and offshore wind tends to be more consistent than onshore (although with higher cost to build) that doesn't sound like a problem?
It's certainly true that Britain has a lot of coastline, and that even allowing for the fact you can't put wind farms in the middle of a shipping lane (unless you don't mind constant collisions because nobody in a large boat can steer worth shit, the UK also has some big rocks, which like wind turbines are marked on charts and don't move yet idiots crash boats into those all the damn time) this works out to mean we could probably more than supply our energy needs from wind turbines + storage.
On the other hand, onshore wind is cheaper and would have been viable all along, the Tories effectively banned it (technically they just made it very easy to block planning permission) for years because that wins over a certain kind of NIMBY voter. You couldn't build enough onshore wind to replace all the fossil fuels, but you could make a bigger dent than we did.
I'm not particularly well-versed in the technology but is there any reason the UK isn't utilising tidal power more? We have areas with some impressive tidal ranges including the Severn Estuary which has the second highest in the world. There was lots of talk about building a tidal lagoon in Swansea back when I lived in Wales but I've not heard anything about that since I moved away some years ago.
The Swansea tidal lagoon was well dodgy… the promoters owned a quarry in Cornwall and they wanted to sell it’s rock at inflated prices (plus producing concrete is hardly carbon friendly)
Severn barrage is interesting but would have a quite large impact on the local nature habitat
I think the reason is that the water keeps surprising people by being really corrosive and otherwise damaging the equipment that's inside it; so it does work, it's just been more expensive to build and maintain than the other options so far.
My understanding is that the technology for hydro isn’t really there as of today. Maybe that will change in the future - that was certainly the case for wind and solar
Given the small land area and extremely high population density relative to its neighbours, onshore wind in the UK was never going to be a large scale solution. "Terrible for onshore" doesn't matter if sufficient generation can be met in other more reasonable ways.
The guardian likes to ignore this, because it doesn't suit its reporting angle much, but England has 1.8x more population density than Germany and 3.6x(!) more than France. This means by simple maths far less available land per capita. Overall the UK comes in closer (but still ahead) of Germany but this is largely due to Scotland, which is a significant proportion of the UK landmass, but has very few people.
The government ban you mention only applies to England, which already has almost half of the UK's onshore wind despite having by far the least space for it. Making complaints that the rural population of England, already under pressure due to soaring population density, doesn't want their remaining rural spaces covered in wind turbines when plenty of other good options exist requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics to justify.
Population densities in people/km2: England 424, Scotland: 68, UK overall 272, Germany: 232, France: 118.
Landmass in thousands of km2: England 130, Scotland: 77, UK overall 242, Germany: 357, France: 551.
The main reason we don’t get more of it is a handful of rich land owners not wanting an “eyesore” on their estates and using their influence to get that result.
I mean, Belgium and the Netherlands and more dense than the UK, and Germany is only a bit less dense. Plus onshore wind can be placed in agricultural areas, in the middle of cropfields.
But the UK's offshore wind potential in incredible, so I get why we do that instead.
It is very high population density surrounded by some places with very low density. But the places with best wind resource in England tend to be AONB, national park. Areas like Lincolnshire, East Anglia have plenty of space.
This is cause for celebration, but it shouldn’t hide the reality that with more than 8 tons per person per year, the UK is in the top 5 most carbon-emitting countries. The country has significant agriculture or industry can justify such a highly polluting regime.
In truth, the UK has horrendous insulation and burns a staggering amount of gas to heat houses made of pasta stainers and wet cardboard; people drive their ICE cars everywhere… There are simple measures that should have been mandatory a decade ago. Instead, the government is too busy arresting the scientists who can help —for the crime of standing there, no less— and handing over subsidies to companies that are making record profits and opening more gas wells.
Far too many Britons dismiss the idea that they’ll be direct victims of climate unsettling. Every model I have seen highlights dire possibilities.
> 8 tons per person per year, the UK is in the top 5 most carbon-emitting countries.
Can you share your sources please? Here, for example, they claim that the UK produces 5.5 tons per person, not 8. Much less than, say, the US with 15 tons:
Almost all the difference is due to bigger homes and more miles driven in the US. Hopefully adoption of heat pumps and electric cars will send that number plummeting in the next decade.
> This is cause for celebration, but it shouldn’t hide the reality that with more than 8 tons per person per year, the UK is in the top 5 most carbon-emitting countries. The country has significant agriculture or industry can justify such a highly polluting regime.
France has been proving for years how to decarbonize fast:
Possibly it's just on mobile, but the French graph seems to be on a completely different scale to the other two. Their agricultural emissions are higher than the UK for example, but at least for me that is far from obvious from the graphs.
It's the Guardian's raison d'etre to be critical of its country to the point of almost derogatory pessimism. I say this as a subscriber. Such analysis also fails to take into account the steps that are [necessarily] taken to mitigate the impact in protected areas and the fact that our land mass is pathetically small compared to other countries on that list.
I’d take any content from the guardian with a pinch of salt. I am certain that most countries ranked below the uk dont have as many protected areas, therefore dont have this issue. While damaging the environment is bad so is the misinformation the guardian loves to spread around.
What about china, canada and nigeria? These protect at most half of what the uk does. Coincidentally germany is EU’s largest co2 emitter and a source of highly polluting cars. While it doesnt extract coal or other resources from its own territory it has no issue in using such resources from other countries. So while in absolute numbers it may appear better, overall it’s worse.
....have a a 100% renewables tariff but my bills go up because of oil/gas prices. WTF.
They also don't go down as quickly as they rise.
The energy market is a giant con.
If demand decreases, the supply/demand intersection will switch to the next highest cost producer. Or the same thing could happen if the supply of cheap electricity increases.
Everybody who shops around has a 100% renewables tariff. What that tells you is that most UK consumers don't shop around. This was more remarkable before prices spiked, because previous to that the actual price you paid was usually much lower if you shopped around, and yet they also threw in "100% renewable" because it costs basically nothing. Now the only price it makes sense to pay is the price the government guaranteed, so shopping around is pointless. Which is fair, that was the reality anyway, the companies "selling" electricity exist only on paper, they aren't laying cables, or building power stations [similar companies in the same corporate family might but it's not important here] they just have a spreadsheet basically.
Anyway, the reason it's so cheap to give the few people who care 100% renewable electricity is that the people selling the electricity get effectively paper "It's renewable" tokens which they can sell separately from the electricity, they're called REGOs.
So say I make 10GWh of wind energy today, I get 10GWh of REGOs. I sell my electricity for the same grid market price as the gas electricity or coal power†, or whatever, nobody cares electricity is fungible, and I also sell my REGOs for very little because they're almost worthless, to Very Green Energy Co.
That huge industrial site near you which makes stuff (I know, they do exist in the UK they just don't employ many people any more). They consume 15GWh of electricity, they don't care where it comes from, maybe it's from me, maybe it isn't, electricity is fungible, who cares. They don't care about the REGOs, they just need electricity.
People like you, in your house, consume 5GWh of electricity. Again, electricity is fungible, so who cares where it came from, maybe it's gas, but Very Green Energy Co. have 10GWh of REGOs, so they can assure you that you're all getting renewable energy.
† Actually the Subsidy rules mean I might sort of sell for a different price, but we'll ignore that here, it doesn't clarify this situation at all.
As a consumer you can't in the UK choose to be fully exposed to price fluctuations, which would completely destroy you. You can choose to be partially exposed, it's very expensive right now, but can be cheaper in some periods. It's a risk, take only if you understand it, Octopus Energy are the people to talk to.
> As a consumer you can't in the UK choose to be fully exposed to price fluctuations, which would completely destroy you. You can choose to be partially exposed, it's very expensive right now, but can be cheaper in some periods. It's a risk, take only if you understand it, Octopus Energy are the people to talk to.
FWIW for the last few months, the Octopus Energy Tracker tariff has been quite a decent chunk below the Ofgem capped unit rates.
E.g. today's gas unit rate is -59% and electric unit rate is -42% below the Ofgem capped rates for my area.
I agree but storage isn't useful if you can't use it. And most people expect their car to be ready when they need it. So all it's good for is to store energy for the car's own use. Which is already exactly what's happening when you plug it in to charge it.
If I had a car I wouldn't be happy if I suddenly decided to go somewhere and the car was empty because it had just been releasing its stored energy to the grid. The whole point of owning a car is having transportation at any time you need it.
100% of the renewable capacity is backed by the equivalent capacity for natural gas. This is fine it it is intended, and people understand that intermittent renewables are inexorably linked to natural gas. At least for the time being.
The alternative is nuclear - which has no such requirement, and is consistent baseline capacity.
No - what is being explained is that you need constant electricity, and wind and solar are not constant, so you need a way to skim the "extra" energy when it's made, and to being it back in the system when there's no wind/sun - by for example using the extra energy to make hydrogen gas and bringing that back in the system at night
People (nuclear advocates usually), like to pretend that the only way to deal with this is an unrealistic number of expensive lithium batteries or fossil fuels but there is also:
* Smart meters that charge cars/turn on heat pump storage when electricity is plentiful. Already being done. German aluminum smelting (heavy electricity user) is dialed up and down depending on live electricity prices.
* Pumped storage. Coire glass will built soon in the UK - pumping out a max of 1.5GW, snowy 2 in Australia will store 350GWh - at the dirt cheap price of $6 billion. 90% efficient. Published studies confirm that, unlike for dams, the geography for this is very plentiful (contrary to nuclear lobby propaganda which routinely and dishonestly argues the exact opposite).
* Hydrogen/windgas - only about 50% efficient round trip but it's easy to store hundreds of GWhs for months, so will be useful to create seasonal storage when, one day (god willing) we get to the point where overbuilt wind and solar manages to supply 100% of current demand and large pumped storage/battery installations are full and we want seasonal storage for the unshiftable demand during the odd windless and dark weeks.
And the double irony is that all those things actively help make nuclear grids more efficient and so have been done for decades with nuclear power in France.
>Published studies confirm that, unlike for dams, the geography for this is very plentiful (contrary to nuclear lobby propaganda which routinely and dishonestly argues the exact opposite).
Could you please link this research? I have yet to find a thorough evaluation of pumped hydro resource availability anywhere.
>We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.
Yea. Burning hydrogen/methane is a last resort if all the other balancing options are not sufficient. It’s expensive but it’s not a problem for two months a year.
> People (nuclear advocates usually), like to pretend that
When is this nonsensical tribalism going to end? Where are all the non-tribal people who are evaluating this stuff on facts and information alone? Why do we hear from the self-disqualifying tribalists?
Rant over. You're right - if we all buy cars with giant lithium batteries in then we need to buy fewer non-car lithium batteries.
And yes, pumped storage exists, and more will exist, but we have to decide how many point-solutions we need to replace consistent generation.
> Hydrogen/windgas - only about 50% efficient round trip
Moving electricity (at least in the UK) is only 90% [0] efficient on transmission alone. So, getting the power to the generation, which then becomes hydrogen at 50% capacity, to later burn at a certain efficiency and turn into electricity that gets transmitted at 90% efficiency, feels wrong. Unless your "round trip" figure includes the transmission losses, but then 50% feels too high to be doing that.
At the end of the day, intermittent renewables and nuclear are both low-externality energy sources chasing the same public funding. Neither competes with high-externality energy sources except in rare situations, and since the public purse isn't infinite they're in competition with each other.
So it'll probably be a while. FWIW, I'm on the intermittent renewables camp, wish there was more civility in the debate, recognize the worst behavior comes from my side of the aisle and still think pro-nuclear arguments are their own worst enemies.
>When is this nonsensical tribalism going to end? Where are all the non-tribal people who are evaluating this stuff on facts and information alone? Why do we hear from the self-disqualifying tribalists?
Remember when anthropogenic global warming denial was mainstream? For MANY MANY years after the scientific evidence was completely undeniable.
Appeals to moderation were everywhere. The media would routinely play deniers with the scientific credentials of a ferret against actual scientists to maintain the appearance of balance and neutrality and claim it was an even debate.
Believers in global warming got filed into a tribe (still are, in many ways) hence they got "instant disqualification" from appeal-to-moderates like yourself who craved the fake balance the media served up.
Those people were almost as bad as the denialists. They werent at all interested in the truth - just some kind of social "balance" or harmony.
The only logical fallacy is you thinking that people changing their minds as more evidence came along is now a reason to attack people who disagree with you on any topic now. I'm not appealing to moderates, or to anyone.
I'm appealing to reason, as opposed to tribalism. You are citing the hurt of a tribe you have decided exists as a group to hurt, and justifying talking badly to other people who you imagine are in another tribe is, well, tribalism. Just stop and we can all have a useful discussion.
The parent said "For MANY MANY years after the scientific evidence was completely undeniable". Maybe he's saying that both sides aren't equally valid and taking their opinions as soon is a waste of resources.
I did present reasoned positions. You just looked past them as your anger welled up.
For me the jabs were about skewering repetitive propaganda from staggeringly wealthy lobby groups with deafening megaphones that emerges from the mouths of the easily duped.
I want to make sure that the easily duped felt seen.
No, but I see what you mean. Generating hydrogen and methane using electricity will probably never be that efficient, but if you have spare power then using it to get 60% of its energy back again in the form of future burnables may still be worth it (percentage guessed and probably optimistic).
Unfortunately they mostly do for wind - we get still days where instead of the ~20GW peak wind, we get ~1GW for a few days. And the low wind pattern often sits over the whole of NW Europe, so transfer doesn't help as much as people hoped since the whole area is low on wind.
And its more expensive than estimates for storage+renewables over its intended lifetime. With nuclear you pay extra to have to change the system less...
It is those situation where the government should just get people to bid on supplying a steady amount of non-fossil fuel energy for a given period in the future, and whoever bids lowest wins.
If there are companies willing to sign a cheaper contract that provide equal stability of a nuclear power by using a combination of fossil free storage and renewables, they should then do that.
The requirements are fairly simple. Provide energy when people want it with the capacity that people require, and supply it as cheap as possible with as little subsidizes as needed. No fossil fuels allowed.
Agreed. That's the idea behind capacity markets, but the idea to pay people for capacity rather than for energy provided seems to be politically difficult, and (some) economists argue it's not needed.
This is excellent news. Unfortunately I think the UK's public understanding of energy production as a whole (let alone clean energy) is far far worse than people online might realise. I'm from the UK.
A few years ago I was on a train as it went past a wind farm within a very short distance. One person in a group of teenagers sat near me said something like "I can't believe they make the wind with them, how did they make wind before?".
They were not joking. I can't remember how the rest of the group reacted but I think I remember none of them seemed particularly aware of what an absurd question that was.
I've had an Irish friend once ask me if the moon we were looking at in Australia was the same one you could see from Ireland.
Sadly it was a genuine question. Education in those parts seems lacking indeed.
Another example: The same Irish person had a nephew who they helped prepare for a presentation about dinosaurs, mentioning they lived millions of years ago.
They were told off by the teacher for spreading such "controversial" information. Church involvement in education is really a no-no IMO. At least if you want to learn more than fairytales.
And don't move on to numbers. Prior to the pandemic which had a devastating effect on school students' numeracy skills in the UK, it's reported millions of adults lack basic numeracy skills, with half of those of working age having the maths ability expected of a primary school child.
> And electricity only accounts for 18% of the UK's total power needs. There are many demands for energy which electricity is not meeting, such as heating our homes, manufacturing and transport. Currently the majority of UK homes use gas for their heating
Perhaps we should start talking about what % of “energy” comes from renewables? Probably far more difficult to calculate and we’ll never hit 100% I guess?