David WE Roberts wrote:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...ars-early.html
"Experts have long warned of the potential for power shortages because
six of Britain's coal stations must close by the end of 2015 under
European rules. However, it now appears that half of these stations,
representing 8pc of Britain's capacity, are likely to shut early because
they will have been burning fuel for too many hours - more than 20,000
in total since 2008.
New Government estimates show Cockenzie, owned by Scottish Power, is
likely to have to close completely by April. Kingsnorth, owned by E.ON,
is on track to have to shut by March 2013. Meanwhile, Tilbury, which is
being converted into a biomass station by RWE, may have to go by July
2013 unless it can convince the European Union (EU) its new fuel is
cleaner.
Experts believe more wind on the grid will help to offset the loss of
power from coal. On Thursday, it emerged that 10pc of the UK's
electricity came from wind for the first time this quarter. However,
Simon Cowdroy, of WSP Future Energy, said: "Although the figures show a
rise in renewable generation, this may not be enough to prevent a
shortfall in UK capacity."
Biomass could replace coal in some power stations. However, a Government
announcement on whether biomass will get higher subsidies has been
delayed this summer.
In recent weeks, a new warning has come from the EU's European
Environment Agency that bioenergy may be no more green than fossil fuels. "
I started out trying to find where the coal for the UK power stations
came from.
http://www.edfenergy.com/about-us/en...ion/coal.shtml
suggests around 50% comes from abroad.
Now I am a bit doubtful about the above statement that 10% of UK energy
came from wind, as Gridwatch isn't showing anywhere near that.
If wind peaks at arounf 1GW then at 10% that would be a maximum demand
of 10GW.
Current (!) demand is between 50 and 60GW.
select avg(wind/demand) from day;
+--------------------+
| avg(wind/demand) |
+--------------------+
| 0.0359833250896992 |
+--------------------+
1 row in set (0.20 sec)
mysql
So winds average contribution has been a proper average...
select avg(wind)/avg(demand) from day;
+-----------------------+
| avg(wind)/avg(demand) |
+-----------------------+
| 0.0351552456519308 |
+-----------------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
make that 3.5%!!
The yearly graphs show that demand hasn't been below 30GW since June.
Perhaps there were a few seconds on windy summer night when the wind
output just touched the 10%?
Even that seems very unlikely.
Too long to post, but there are not a few samples in the database where
wind power exceeded 10% of demand for an hour or two. A warm wet windy
night is the best time to see this.
All of which leaves me with the depressing thought that if they are
closing coal fired power stations, not building new Carbon Capture ones,
not building nukes, and most of our gas will be coming from other
countries we are going to be in deep **** relatively soon.
Yup.
Oh, and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...e-dash-for-gas
says
"The UK's "dash for gas" will be halted by the government because if
unchecked it would break legally binding targets for carbon dioxide
emissions, Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, said on
Monday evening.
Chris Huhne is not teh energy and climate change secretary any more.
"We will not consent so much gas plant so as to endanger our carbon
dioxide goals," he told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrats party
conference in Birmingham.
Utter ********. we HAVE to add gas to complement wind power. The two are
inseparable.
The number of gas-fuelled power plants is increasing rapidly because
they are fast and cheap to build compared with alternatives. They also
create about half the carbon emissions of coal-powered plants and have
been seen as a "transition fuel", helping smooth the path to zero-carbon
electricity.
The number of gas plants being CLOSED is increasing, because wind is
more profitable and gas is very expensive, and the more wind you have
the less hours the gas plant runs to recoup its capital investment.
Barry Neville, director of public affairs at Centrica, which owns
British Gas, said: "Gas is a critical part of the fuel mix, it's a
transition fuel. At this moment in time it is crucial to the UK, as is
nuclear and as are renewables.
Actually renewables are not crucial for anything..
But climate change campaigners have warned that too much gas capacity is
being built, meaning either the carbon budgets intended to help tackle
global warming would be broken, or the gas plants would be left as
stranded assets.
"The secretary of state's statement is a welcome recognition by the
government that there are constraints on the deployment of gas as a
climate-effective solution to our future energy needs," said David
Nussbaum, chief executive of WWF UK. "The government should be looking
at the deployment of renewables, that already must be at 30% by 2020, at
increasing rates during the 2020s.""
Oh, and what are renewables?
One of the claims above is that biomass is no more green than fossil fuels.
Yep teh greens want to close down the wopodburner thats just got going
at Tilbury and is contributing half a a gigawatt.
That probably leaves hydro, solar and wind.
The prospect of over 30% of the UK power demand coming reliably from
hydro, solar and wind is not looking good, especially on the still
winter nights.
Despite massive investment, Germany has utterly failed to generate any
solar power after dark. But we are reliably informed that better
technology and more investment will solve this minor problem.
Bottom line - if we want to be self sufficient in power generation what
alternatives are there to nuclear (and even then I assume we need the
fissionables from abroad)?
There are none at all.
We are not self sufficient in energy and we cannot ever be.
However a program of fast breeder reactors making more nuclear fuel out
of anything remotely fissile might make us so. As can fracking in the
short term - or even opening new coal mines..open cast scraping of poor
grade coal is relatively cheap, and we can burn brown coal as well as
any German.
Electricity is a sideshow though. The bigger problem is how to run the
transport system without petrol and diesel.