Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
Roland Perry writes:
In message , at 10:12:50 on Sat, 26 Apr
2008, tony sayer remarked:
And, of course, places like Cambridge are maxed out on the wholesale
supply of electricity. So you can't just build some nooclear power
stations, sell everyone electrical heating, without a lot of other
infrastructure upgrades as well.
Their building a new additional line from the Burwell super grid station
to supply Cambridge. In fact it should be built by now...
One town down, several hundred more to go.

This is a really big issue in the National Grid too...

a) Much of the grid equipment is now 50 years old and end of life.
b) The grid was designed to carry power from the coal fired power
stations mostly located at the coal mines to the industrial
centres of 50 years ago. Coal generated power has halved and is
intended to drop to very low levels. The industrial centres of
50 years ago are now mostly dead. This means the grid is not in
the best places to transfer power from current and future
generation plant to today's consumers.
c) The grid is at max capacity.
d) It now takes longer to build or upgrade one line (nearly 10
years, due to planning, public enquires, etc) than it took to
build the whole grid 50 years ago.

This has lots of implications for new generation plant. Most of
the potential renewable generation locations are nowhere near the
grid. Even those that are are finding they can't feed power into
the grid because it's already at full capacity, either locally,
or at a distant bottleneck. One such is that Scotland can't
feed more than 2GW to England, which is contributing to a 7 year
waiting list for new generators in Scotland to get a connection
to the grid. (This creates an interesting problem given that
planning permission for new plant lasts for 5 years, so it's
expired long before you can connect up, and no one's going to
build plant 2 or more years before they can use it.)

It takes politicians to create such a fiasco.


Utterly agree, Or rather to not recognise tehdanger of not stepping in
and stopping it.


EU is pushing (maybe even legislating) countries to ensure they
have interconnects equivalent to 10% of their electricty
requirement, to promote international competition in electricity
sales. That actually seems unusually sensible. We're currently
a long way off that with 2GW to France and 0.5GW to Ireland.



Its all very well for landlocked brussels to say that, but it costs us
10x more to cross a strip of sea with a cable than an unmanned border
post in luxembourg.