Renewable Energy

[kiyan]

Everyone celebrates when the UK hits a 20 or 30% usage of renewable energy, recently  the news made a big thing when wind power accounted for 43% of energy usage.

While I fully support  the move to reusable  energy sources I do not support the pretence by some that it is the solution.

Tonight, on a calm hot evening wind power is providing less than 3% of UK power requirement. Approx.. 55%  is being provided by gas power stations and 23% by nuclear power stations that should have been decommissioned 10 years ago.

What is the back up to wind?  What happens on nights like this one ( which we  are told are going to happen more often) ?

[Bedford Roughyed]

There should be more nuclear, and that has been the same for a decade but no politician (any party) had the foresight or balls to do it.

More solar, more wind, more storage, more  investment in energy reduction (better home regs for example.

Nuclear as baseload, renewables as much as they can, gas for surge and gap plugging (along with imports).

simples

[JonM]

On 6/27/2018 at 3:44 AM, Bedford Roughyed said:

There should be more nuclear, and that has been the same for a decade but no politician (any party) had the foresight or balls to do it.

More solar, more wind, more storage, more  investment in energy reduction (better home regs for example.

Nuclear as baseload, renewables as much as they can, gas for surge and gap plugging (along with imports).

simples

Spot on. But are we not (incredibly slowly and expensively) getting some new nuclear power stations built for us by the French & Chinese? Hinckley Point C is one.

[ckn]

On 6/27/2018 at 3:33 AM, kiyan said:

Everyone celebrates when the UK hits a 20 or 30% usage of renewable energy, recently  the news made a big thing when wind power accounted for 43% of energy usage.

While I fully support  the move to reusable  energy sources I do not support the pretence by some that it is the solution.

Tonight, on a calm hot evening wind power is providing less than 3% of UK power requirement. Approx.. 55%  is being provided by gas power stations and 23% by nuclear power stations that should have been decommissioned 10 years ago.

What is the back up to wind?  What happens on nights like this one ( which we  are told are going to happen more often) ?

The problem with things like that is that attitude is the one politicians like when they don't want to invest.  There are whole environment systems in place that smooth the peaks and troughs, for example hydroelectric batteries that cater for when one source, e.g. wind, isn't generating short-term.

Other countries are aggressively investing in this and many are finding the sole limiter is their national power distribution infrastructure rather than generating capacity.  All it takes is political willpower and the desire to invest for the long-term rather than just over the next electoral cycle.

[Bedford Roughyed]

41 minutes ago, JonM said:

Spot on. But are we not (incredibly slowly and expensively) getting some new nuclear power stations built for us by the French & Chinese? Hinckley Point C is one.

Yes we are, but incredibly slowly is on the button, I don't think any major work has started at hinkley yet?

[JonM]

8 minutes ago, Bedford Roughyed said:

Yes we are, but incredibly slowly is on the button, I don't think any major work has started at hinkley yet?

Haven't been near there for ~18 months, but they had built a car park and accommodation for the workforce and there was a lot of activity on site.

[kiyan]

16 hours ago, ckn said:

The problem with things like that is that attitude is the one politicians like when they don't want to invest.  There are whole environment systems in place that smooth the peaks and troughs, for example hydroelectric batteries that cater for when one source, e.g. wind, isn't generating short-term.

Other countries are aggressively investing in this and many are finding the sole limiter is their national power distribution infrastructure rather than generating capacity.  All it takes is political willpower and the desire to invest for the long-term rather than just over the next electoral cycle.

hydroelectric batteries?

Just to explain to the forum that is a polite way of  suggesting you flood half the peak district or North Wales.

ie hydroelectric batteries in reality means building dams, flooding large areas and releasing water to create electricity on peak and then pumping that water back up again off peak ( or when the wind is blowing)

Your quoted example is Norway, who have large uninhabited valleys which are easily made into hydroelectric batteries.

In England and Wales the only suitable areas are National Parks, so which one do you propose flooding and moving people out of?

 

[ckn]

7 hours ago, kiyan said:

hydroelectric batteries?

Just to explain to the forum that is a polite way of  suggesting you flood half the peak district or North Wales.

ie hydroelectric batteries in reality means building dams, flooding large areas and releasing water to create electricity on peak and then pumping that water back up again off peak ( or when the wind is blowing)

Your quoted example is Norway, who have large uninhabited valleys which are easily made into hydroelectric batteries.

In England and Wales the only suitable areas are National Parks, so which one do you propose flooding and moving people out of?

 

That was an example of countries not just sitting back and ignoring the problem. 

[tonyXIII]

My take on renewable energy is this, fwiw.

The real problem is not generation of energy, it is storage of that energy until we need it. I believe there are currently only two ways to do this. Firstly, batteries. This is okay for relatively small amounts of energy, but falls down when you are trying to keep large cities supplied with power through the night. The number of batteries required would be astronomical and these batteries are not really environmentally suitable (that's a polite way of putting it). Secondly, gravity. This is the Dinorwic (I think that's its name) solution whereby water is pumped uphill to a storage site (aka lake) when energy is plentiful and allowed to flow downhill, turning turbines to generate power when energy is needed. This is geographically difficult as you need a suitable site with a hill which has a lake near its summit.

I don't know what the solution is, but I saw a piece on Click (probably still on BBC iPlayer) recently which showed a Californian company using a rail solution for this. When energy is plentiful, heavy wagons are driven uphill on rails, when energy is needed, the wagons roll downhill and energy is generated through their braking system. You need quite a lot of wagons. It was interesting, but will still meet with environmental objections.

Short of some fantastic new means of shifting energy from one side of the Earth to the other, I don't see a really nice solution. Which does not mean we shouldn't keep trying.

 

[Farmduck]

There is a technique for converting CO2 back into C and O2 so, with a 5-10% loss rate in each cycle, you could end up burning the same carbon 10-15 times, effectively cutting emissions by 90-95% Also cuts down the need for coalmines since you could effectively just burn municipal rubbish and save all the carbon from that. Since you have all this Oxygen being collected, you could burn the rubbish in an oxygen-enriched environment, improving the combustion, potentially even using up all the backlog of waste plastic. I assume the technique currently costs more than it saves in terms of fuel but there may be some way to work around that. I'll try to find the article.

Aligned with this is another technique for converting water to ethanol, so the water which is also produced in combustion could be recycled too.

We will be using the Dinorwig (we call it "pumped hydro") system here but we have a lot more (and higher) mountains than the UK. Unfortunately they are all in the South East corner of the country so this solution wouldn't help much beyond Sydney and Melbourne.

[Bedford Roughyed]

Currently 0% coal, 8% wind and 18% solar.  

More homes doing micro generation would be great.  

[Saintslass]

On ‎6‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 3:44 AM, Bedford Roughyed said:

There should be more nuclear, and that has been the same for a decade but no politician (any party) had the foresight or balls to do it.

I disagree with this.  I don't know how old you are but I am old enough to remember a popular and political environment in which nuclear was the very last thing we wanted to develop due mainly to the problem of how to deal with the waste produced but also the risk of leakage (Which of course did happen at the old Windscale plant.  I believe some sheep are still glowing in Cumbria as a result …).   So nuclear was very unfashionable and for very good reason.  We still haven't resolved the waste problem and we now have the added risk of Islamist terrorism to add to leakage.

[Damien]

I remember seeing various articles about building a barrage on the Severn estuary and that such a barrage could provide about 7% of the country's power. I think cost and environmental concerns have always been an issue.