"Pancho" wrote in message
...
On 20/01/2020 17:13, Rod Speed wrote:


"Pancho" wrote in message
...
On 20/01/2020 14:12, Rod Speed wrote:


"Pancho" wrote in message
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On 20/01/2020 11:09, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 20/01/2020 11:04, Pancho wrote:
On 20/01/2020 04:32, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Nuclear is as capable of rapid dispatch as coal was and coal ran
the entire grid once.

You can store a lot of energy in a big steam boiler

And in the UK we have enough hydro to cover the intermediate
dispatch requirements.




We were discussing high capacity , do keep up.

You really dont understand the subject do you?

Very short term dispatch is catered for by the rotating masses of the
turbines: That covers a powerstation tripping

Minute level dispatch is catered for by hydro and steam in boilers.
hpor level dispatch is catered for by turning the nukes up and down.
Or having some gas.
Renewables contribute zero to all of this and batteries and hydroigen
are an expensive inegffficent (and dangerous) substitute for pumped
storage


Pumped storage only lasts for hours, this is not enough to cover
extended periods of excess demand. Hydrogen offers the potential to
provide months of storage.

Hydrogen is expensive but if you have over capacity you might as well
do something with it. We do not have enough mountains to pump water
up.

Neither do the french and their system works fine.


The French do have significantly more mountains than the UK.

That may well be true, but given
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...power_stations
it doesnt appear that they have any more pumped
storage than the UK and use the different fuel rod
approach for handling the varying load on their
system instead of pumped storage.
But that doesnt actually list the MWh of their's.

They have significantly more hydro power.

Thats a separate issue to how best to handle the
varying load on nukes.

Pumped and hydro (dams) can serve the purpose, load balancing, rapid
dispatch.

But the french actually use the fuel rod approach
instead and that works very well for them and
doesnt have the downside of the flooded
valley no longer being available for other uses.

How the water gets to the top of the mountain doesn't really matter.

It does when the fuel rod approach has far
fewer downsides. And doesnt have the grossly
bad inefficiency and storage problem that the
hydrogen approach has.

The French also use fossil fuels for heating.

Another separate issue to varying load on the nukes.

It is most efficient to run Nukes flat out.

But efficiency isnt the only consideration.

France Nukes produce too much in summer and too little in winter.

But even easier to have some nukes offline
in summer and enough so you can generate
all you need in winter than to spend immense
amounts of money on hydrogen for that problem.

Hence extra seasonal (winter) generation power is balancing the Nukes.

But we were discussing whether hydrogen
makes sense for that. It doesnt. The fuel
rod approach makes a lot more sense.

Pumped Hydro, is short term balancing, minutes/
hours. Coal and gas is seasonal balancing.

Makes a lot more sense to have enough nukes
to supply all the winter demand and shut down
some of them for maintenance in summer and
not waste coal and gas on power generation and
have the real downside of the carbon produced.