Dirty diesel backups will make Hinkley Point C look like a bargain

zero carbon means a significant amount of nuclear

Even as a US liberal (so probably European moderate) I have to admit we aren't going zero carbon without nuclear (maybe fusion if we get incredibly lucky). The numbers just don't add up. Not a real big fan of creating waste that can kill life millions of years from now but considering we are looking at a second degree Celsius increase by 2050 (already at one) even with Paris agreements, zero carbon energy (at least in the developed world) is going to happen (along with probably mandated zero emission transportation). The human climate change denial much like the tobacco companies tactics will only work for so long as will building gas plants today.

Re: Heads in the cloud or so far up their...

we are now in the situation where we have no real choice but to sign this deal.

Oh, we did have a choice. The answer is more CCGT if you want low cost, if you're a mouth-frothing carbonista, determined that CO2 is the source of all evil, then the answer is indeed nuclear, just not the Areva EPR.

Much of the prep work at Hiinkley Point could have been reused for a couple of KEPCO APR1400. The APR1400 is proven to work, they're much cheaper than the Areva EPR, and even with the late start would probably be built quicker than the Areva plant.

And even with Hinkley Point C getting an unjustified sign off by idiot politicians, they are proposing to allow both Nugen(Westinghouse AP1000) and Horizon (Hitatchi ABWR) to build new nuclear plants to totally different designs. So we'll be paying for three different designs, multiple safety reviews, losing any economies of scale. All of this sad, motley nuclear fleet will be owned by foreign investors, all the IP, design and most high value plant will be foreign, all will need to be handsome subsidised out of your electricity bills, and all are being built miles and miles from any demand centre, so guaranteeing that the low grade heat will be just waste energy, and the transmission losses will be maximised.

All because our politicians and civil servants are a collection of unredeemed eco-obsessed fuckwits.

Re: Heads in the cloud or so far up their...

some Green Party mouth piece was banging on how we should be investing in research into renewables rather than building a new power station - "we could be world leaders in renewables!!" he cried.

Ok, fair point.

I don't think it is a "fair point". The Greens are very good at agitating from the sidelines but how many of them are actively engaged in developing "renewables"? They are very good at being noisy but when it comes to the reality of providing a reliable source of a domestic and business energy supply I strongly suspect that they simply haven't a clue.

IMHO there ought to be special hospitals where Green Enthusiasts are treated; operating theatres where if the power suddenly drops the operation stops and the patient, er, dies. Ward heating would, of course, be permanently unavailable.

They might feel very righteous about their stance about I don't think that they have thought it through to its logical end-point.

Re: Heads in the cloud or so far up their...

"we could be world leaders in renewables!!" he cried...

Ok, fair point. With sufficient research we could be...

Just remember what happened to South Australia where too much renewables destabilised the grid and caused a state wide blackout.

The Germans discovered that much over 15% renewable energy caused big problems a few years ago. Yet the eco-greens will never learn the maxim that renewables can not supply base load.

Re: Heads in the cloud or so far up their...

Personally I think Hink C was the wrong move, at least on its own and now.

The way these projects run I doubt we will see any generation until at least 2030, as the story points out we are out of juice now!. The greens are correct in stating that we should be researching "clean" energy, but by no means will that cover the UK or any other large nation in any respectable time.

Fusion research would have been the way to go, 20 years ago.. Fission reactors should have been built over the past 10 years to increase the base capacity.

Smart Grids should have been designed with the subsidy for Solar PV, and Wind Turbines. There should have been requirements to feed indirectly into the grid using battery systems that would provide a small buffer in the storage. It is my understanding that many Wind systems now actually store the power and deploy it on demand.

Renewables and Clean energy is not the devil here. The devil is that plans should have been going on 10 or 20 years ago to deal with today. Today it is here and now someone is forced to deal with it.

Bear in mind that "Natural Gas" power stations here were viewed as a great thing, and "Fracking" was going to come along and save the UK. The thing is that "Fracking" in the USA and Canada see's the owners of the land "generally" the "Royalties" from the product. In the UK it goes to the "Royal" people. The great economic "Boom" wouldn't go along with it, consumers wouldn't pass money back into that system. So while they could be a good or great thing, gas for them would need to be imported.

I have solar panels, and I do benefit from "everyone" who has to buy electricity. The price I am paid for it is around 50p per KWH, that is a lot less than the strike price for HinkC, and new solar installs are perhaps only 1/5th of what mine is... What all of these systems need is storage - then they become really useful. My solar panels probably add somewhere around 0.6% additional cost to the UK bill (Including my own bill!). So Solar and Wind subsidies have increased your bill by less than 1%, but HinkC will cost you a good bit more than that - If it ever gets built!

Re: we could be world leaders in renewables..

Why ever would we want to be?

That's a bit like wanting to be the first lemming over the cliff..

Re: Heads in the cloud or so far up their...

"Ok, fair point. With sufficient research we could be," - Coward.

You are two decades too late.

China is the world leader in renewable power, and will remain on top for the rest of your, and your children's lives.

Denial of reality has economic costs.

Re: "A winter in which the wind doesn't blow"

Unfortunately, it's quite common for the the whole of Europe to suffer week long (or longer) still periods when a high pressure parks itself over Europe in the depths of a very cold spell. This happened a few years ago (I remember it never went above freezing where we are for a couple of weeks) and will happen again.

Have a look at http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ and you'll see that there have been quite a few times in the past year where wind has contributed just about nothing over the whole of the UK.

Remember last year (I think) when the greens harped on about wind producing more than Nuclear for a day? They failed to mention that was because it was very windy over the whole UK and there were a lot of nuclear plants off line at the same time for maintenance (they go off grid about once every three years). They also never mention when nuclear is producing 20 times what wind is...

Re: Storage as a service

For short-ish term use, pumped storage is still I believe the best option in the UK, and I'm sure there are plenty of places suitable for use. I have a document somewhere which was issued when they propsed building Dinorwic power station which also proposed a second site on (IIRC) Exmoor, or perhaps it was Dartmoor. It wasn't built because it wasn't needed; at the time we had all the base load covered by coal and nuclear, and Dinorwic's fast response was enough to tide the system over until gas plant could spool up.

Dinorwic is by far the largest of its kind in the UK and there a loads of much smaller schemes (for example, just up the road from Dinorwic at Ffestiniog, but surely we have plenty of options in the hilly parts of the country for more large stations to be built? It's not even as if they need be unsightly.

Why doesn't anyone talk about pumped storage any more? It seems to me to be the perfect way of smoothing the output from wind and sun.

M.

Re: Storage as a service

No, there isn't a solution at scale in the next decade. There are many different research projects underway, but as usual we started funding this far too late.

Re: Storage as a service

Wind farm being used to power a pumped-storage hydro station would work pretty well.

I've also seen projects where a wind generator is hooked up to a miniaturized electrolysis-based hydrogen/oxygen generator. The collected gases are then burned in a fuel cell or in a regular boiler for a power station.

Wind is much like a waiter at a restaurant, always there when you need them the least and never there when you actually need them.

Re: Storage as a service

WOULD be the answer if there were any technology remotely capable of providing it.

AS it is, take a useless technology like intermittent renewable energy, then treble its cost by constructing massively underutilised interconnectors, and storage units everywhere, and you call that a success?

Renewable energy is already far more expensive than the most overpriced and bloated nuclear project, so we should add to its expense to ameliorate its fundamentally flawed nature?

I have a turd for you to polish.

Re: Greens just don't understand numbers

Sorry, I hadn't seen yours when I posted mine, and I'll admit I posted mine without considering the real numbers...

Someone crunches the numbers and finds that Britain would need 390 more Dinorwigs

Interesting point. I believe Dinorwig is capable of 1.3GW for five hours? I also believe there's a total of about 13GW installed wind capacity in the UK, so logically you'd need 10 Dinorwigs to replace a complete loss of wind for up to five hours, or 50 to do so for a whole day. Your 390 stations could power the country for about a windless week.

It still strikes me as a better storage plan than anything else that's been proposed, but I have to admit here that I'm totally in favour of a few more nuclear stations.

Dinorwig is limited by the size of the top lake. If you could build another Dinorwig but give it a bigger lake you would change the equation. There must be places suitable...

M.

Cheaper storage than pushing water uphill

P2G (Power to Gas) will almost certainly become a much cheaper form of storage, though won't ever be as efficient as pumped storage. Given spot price ratios between expensive electricity at more than 2.0, the efficiency loss inherent in P2G at a say 50% efficiency ratio doesn't matter very much, though best available designs look closer to 70%. The problem with the pumped storage is that the cost gets higher once the best sites have been developed, while the cost of P2G, like that of wind electricity, will improve with scale.

Interestingly, the best places to locate P2G plants are more likely to be adjacent to biomass renewable electricity generators than wind generators, due to the continuous availablity of electricity and renewable CO2 feedstock at the same location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas

Re: 390 Dinorwigs

Except they'd need to be a dam site deeper because windless periods can last a whole lot longer than the few hours that these kinds of plant can actually run for at full capacity.

(And yes, damn pedants, I know...)

Re: Greens just don't understand numbers

The sadly lost David Mckays "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" should be required reading for anyone interested in energy. All his observations are beautifully argued with quantitative figures. with nuclear being a big part of his solution (it's still downloadable btw,).

As far as the UK becoming a world leader goes, Buying in Uranium based PWRs is just dumb, the weapons proliferation, waste and extreme operating environment they use are just too expensive to manage. Thorium cycle machines seem to solve most of those problems and if we were to go into partnership with China and India that would be a world beater

If that is too ambitious I reckon that the technology and manufacture of renewables generation is pretty much worked out, but storage systems at the local level are still up for grabs. In the same way as every small town had it's own gas-works in the 19thC maybe a local storage\smoothing works for electricity could be a growth industry for the 21stC

There's even room for a bit of synergy, if we had molten salt thorium reactors and molten salt storage a lot of shared technology.

Re: Greens just don't understand numbers

Build more storage, they cry

As well they might. However, quite apart from the shortage of places where "Dinorwig" could be replicated there is the point that such schemes require more power to pump the reservoir up again than it delivered in the first place. No machine is 100% efficient; the Laws of Thermodynamics see to that.

So where is the power to recharge the reservoir to come from? What happens if the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow?

More elderly and "fuel impoverished" people die, but I doubt if the Greens have really considered that.

Re: Greens just don't understand numbers

I'm ready for the inevitable 'brown outs' that will hit us. Mabye not this year or next but they will come.

I have a 6Kw PV array on my house. This feeds the grid and charges a load of car batteries. When the power goes out, I'll have my own version of a Tesla Powerwall ready to go. With the current battery setup I can get 8-10 hours unless I want to do any cooking outside of the Microwave.

If more of us did this then the brownouts will be shorter and you would pay a lot less to the leecy companies.

Standby generators that are commonly referred to as "diesels" don't necessarily run on diesel fuel or even gas oil. GE Jenbacher engines can quite happily be connected up to a standard natural gas supply and burn methane while generating. The "diesel" refers to the prime mover being a diesel cycle engine.

Diesel "price at the pump" graphic

"What has the price at the pump got to do with it?"

Quite. If anything, that graphic shows that the UK doesn't have the most expensive diesel in Europe before the Government takes its slice of the pump price. And industrial and agricultural diesel users don't pay the pump price. Odd.

Re: Ignore the externalities, as usual

Don't worry, our children can pay for all that, just as long as the lights stay on this winter.

You Luddite. In fact you IGNORANT Luddite. The vast costs of nuclear decommissioning in the UK are largely due to the reckless and dirty weapons programmes of the fifties and sixties. Nuclear power decommissioning is a walk in the park.

Re: Ignore the externalities, as usual

Ignore reality, as usual.

If the lights don't stay on then there won't be many children anyway, because the poor will die.

Although it's generally the elderly poor who die first, which I suppose would reduce the load on the NHS.

This is why it matters.

Re: Ignore the externalities, as usual

Nuclear waste storage has never been a problem. Anti nuclear propaganda however has proved insuperable.

do you work for VW by any chance?

Clean Diesels?

And pigs might fly.

Diesel generators can be clean

In this context, they shouldn't need to be, because the whole point of peaking plant is that it rarely runs. The article is correct that due to the imbecilic strategy of adding large volumes of intermittent generating plant to the grid, we will now need more peaking plant, and it will run more often and will inherently be less efficient, but even so, as part of a mix of technologies for peaking plant diesel farms are unfairly demonised.

However, we're certainly on the road to high priced hell. The "renewables" destabilise the grid. The article doesn't describe how close we've come over the summer to brown outs for broadly similar reasons, but its happening more and more as the pell-mell build out of eco-toys continues. And then we've got the government signing up for Hinkley Point, and utter, utter idiots are therefore locking in what used to be peak power prices to baseload. That is a hugely important issue that has been widely overlooked.

Now, as you note, the diesel plant could be cleaned up at a cost. But if it doesn't run often, then that's a luxury that we cannot really afford. Of course, in all of this talk of "dirty diesels", the hippies are remarkably silent about the appalling air quality on the all-electric London Underground.

You too huh? Brownouts don't happen often enough or for long enough to need a dedicated helpline besides which most people know who their supplier is. www.powercut105.com - something to take the flak when the inevitable occurs?

Next it will be, 'your failure to install personal generation equipment and/or off-peak storage batteries has lead to the triggering of your smart meter kill switch during periods of high demand. It is your responsibility to make supplementary provision as the national grid cannot be relied upon to provide power at all times'

Re: That's all fine and good...

... but I'd think that base load is not particularly high in the UK, because thanks to Thatcher it's largely de industrialized and people in the UK tend to do things like making cups of tea at the same time with an electric kettle.

Peak to base is greater in France and Germany, IIRC. But don't let facts get in the way of your point.

Re: That's all fine and good...

Except your post is factually incorrect. Both coal and nuclear power plants can be ramped over wide ranges quire quickly, and before Dinorwig and before CCGT that's how the grid was regulated. It not especially efficient, but its certainly possible. And the French do it all the time with their nuclear fleet.

Solar plalnts may pop out where energy is needed if your prime energy users are refrigeration and air conditioning, but where is heating and lighting - as it is anywhere in the temperate or Arctic zones - they fail to provide power when most needed. After dark, in winter.

There is no evidence that grid instability is linked to trading blocks, certainly not in this country.

I think we can therefore dismiss your post as simply more 'magic thinking' - the invention of a reality that conforms to your prejudice, rather than one based on actual researched facts, which is obviously too much effort for you.

Re: They could have build 10 GW scale tidal plants for the same amount of money

While the wind may or may not blow, the tide knows no such things. It will come and go twice a day, every day for millenniums to come.

Completely at odds with either continuous industrial processes, or the human body's diurnal clock. So better fact in in the storage costs for when high tide is at 01:00.

Re: They could have build 10 GW scale tidal plants for the same amount of money

Just last week I went to a talk on the Swansea one that's getting under way around now.

Yes, it's a good technology, and yes it could provide quite a useful contribution.

Max 14 (or thereabouts) hours generating per day. Overall load factor of about 25% - ie take whatever rating they say, and divide by 4 because of the time it's not generating at all, or only generating at part load, or using power for pumping, and allowing for variations in tide height that affect the power available.

So yes, good technology, reliable, dependable, but still intermittent (even after adding on the variation in tide times around the country) and subject to variations in output over various timecales. But unlike wind, those variations are predictable in advance - years in advance so it's much more manageable.

Re: mass produced SMR is the future

Right... the nation that takes 30 years to build a runway will allow new nuclear reactors dotted about the place.

Re: Wind power in South Australia

You miss the pint. That generation capacity was at the end of long interconnects, because that state has renewable energy only, and when that failed, and the interconnects failed, they had nothing.

Its as disingenuous as saying that a tornado in texas is caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil.

Renewable grids are ipso facto less resilient than ones based on properly distributed fossil plant. If a whole state gets knocked out because a single tower blows over, its poorly designed, and if the reason its poorly designed is that its designed to meet political rather than engineering objectives, then frankly I blame the politicians.

Renewable energy of the intermittent sort is pure pants in all bit a very few specialised locations, and Australia ain't one of em.

One of the many blessings of Brexit is that the UK wont be forced to adopt EU mandated energy strategies, but will be free to pick what is tried tested and proven to work instead.

Single strategies are jolly good if they turn out to be the right strategy, but how many government lead technology projects are anything but a massive waste of time money and personnel?

Re: Wind power in South Australia

Try reading some facts rather than relying on green propaganda.

http://joannenova.com.au/2016/09/entire-state-of-south-australia-without-electricity-as-storm-hits/

http://joannenova.com.au/2016/09/the-south-australian-black-out-a-state-running-without-enough-thermal-reserve-to-cope-with-contingencies/

Re: Wind power in South Australia

applying a "green" friend's logic - the sort they apply to nuclear, which goes "nuclear bomb going off = bad, therefore anything nuclear = bad", the phrase "There was more than adequate generation capacity available, the problem was transmission towers being blown over because there was too much wind" must 'logically' (haha) mean that wind power is a bad thing?

Sorry Adam1 but a few power pylons being down DOES NOT shut down the whole state just parts supplied by those lines.

According to the guardian, 3 of the 4 lines feeding Adelaide from the north were taken down from 22 downed towers at 5 different places.

The coal plant they mothballed because of these wind farms is at Port Augusta. Those who down voted you evidently haven't ever looked at a map or think that coal power is magical and can be delivered to the population centres without these transmission lines.