UK Renewable Energy Capacity Surpasses Fossil Fuels For First Time (theguardian.com) 147
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The capacity of renewable energy has overtaken that of fossil fuels in the UK for the first time, in a milestone that experts said would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In the past five years, the amount of renewable capacity has tripled while fossil fuels' has fallen by one-third, as power stations reached the end of their life or became uneconomic. The result is that between July and September, the capacity of wind, solar, biomass and hydropower reached 41.9 gigawatts, exceeding the 41.2GW capacity of coal, gas and oil-fired power plants.
Imperial College London, which compiled the figures, said the rate at which renewables had been built in the past few years was greater than the "dash for gas" in the 1990s. However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations. In terms of installed capacity, wind is the biggest source of renewables at more than 20GW, followed by solar spread across nearly 1m rooftops and in fields. Biomass is third.
Imperial College London, which compiled the figures, said the rate at which renewables had been built in the past few years was greater than the "dash for gas" in the 1990s. However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations. In terms of installed capacity, wind is the biggest source of renewables at more than 20GW, followed by solar spread across nearly 1m rooftops and in fields. Biomass is third.
Is anyone surprised by this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amory Lovins, a well-known advocate of renewable energy, likes to tell the story of how the whales were saved from extinction in the mid-1800s by "profit maximizing capitalists" who brought kerosene to market, which rapidly wrecked the market for whale oil. This is the same story... renewables are simply getting to be cheaper than fossil fuels now, and the trend is only going to continue as technology improves and fossil fuels become harder to extract.
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Climate change is a far more immediate problem than running out of fossil fuels. Coal will still be cheap to extract for millennia after Antarctica melts.
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Altruistically? No, there will never be public will for the billions (trillions?) of dollars per year necessary for that. On the other hand, if there is a price on carbon emissions (either a direct tax, or some indirect mechanism that puts a clear price on it), then there could eventually be profit-making companies that perfor
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Saskatchewan gave up, and decided to buy Hydroelectric power from its neighbour instead. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
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Actually, surprisingly, coal is already more expensive than wind and solar. The latest Lazard report is pricing utility-scale solar and wind under the cost of just the FUEL for coal-fired power stations.
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Amory Lovins, a well-known advocate of renewable energy, likes to tell the story of how the whales were saved from extinction in the mid-1800s by "profit maximizing capitalists" who brought kerosene to market, which rapidly wrecked the market for whale oil.
Silly person, there is no profit in saving whales.
Re:Is anyone surprised by this? (Score:5, Informative)
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...instead they were drowning in smog and lead.
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That gives me an idea for a new source of renewable energy! Catch some whales and attach them to giant offshore wheels to produce electricity.
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Whale Oil Beef Oct
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Not completely accurate, it really depends upon whether or not you have significant fossil fuel resources ie if you import fossil fuels, than renewables are far better for balance of trade, if you export fossil fuels, renewables are a catastrophe. Hence the push to get some fossil fuel exporters out of the market to inflate prices for those remaining, the US will use threats of war, to cut off competitors and to promote the highest price for it's fossil fuels. So those who do not export oil will fund renewa
Re:Is anyone surprised by this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Or wishful whales! From Wales.
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You're on to something.
Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky (Score:5, Insightful)
This is great but there is still a long way to go. Renewable capacity is not really comparable to fossil fuel power station capacity because the coal / gas ones can run 24/7...
To get a better picture of where we are check out http://grid.iamkate.com/ [iamkate.com] . Basically in the last year UK electricity was 19% from renewable sources with fossil fuels at 48%.
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California water wars [wikipedia.org]
Tri-state water dispute [wikipedia.org]
Not sure if that's what you were talking about, but they're definitely storing pumped water.
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We need to start building more storage. Big batteries. That will allow renewables to take on a larger proportion of the generation.
Still, even without that 20% over a year is impressive considering where we were a decade ago, and the dire predictions of flickering lights if we got this far.
Re:Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky (Score:4, Informative)
On top of all that, you've also got the psychological factor. People expect their car to be ready to go when required, and even with a safety net of any discharge to the grid will not take their car's battery below (say) 75% charge, that's still a 25% variance in how far the car will be able to go without requiring a top-up. While they'd presumably be able to set the threshold to ensure their morning commute, apparently that's enough ambiguity to trigger range anxiety to the point that many electric car owners would set a minimal contribution, or opt out entirely.
That's not to say a distributed battery system - using cars, powerwalls, or whatever else, won't work, or even be implemented, eventually, but I think there's a lot of infrastructure to be built, technology advances that need to happen, and consumer adoption to be encouraged before it can.
Re:Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky (Score:5, Interesting)
If I had a dollar for every time someone suggests OMG EV battery storage for the grid....
You nailed the problems on the head. Using an EV to supply battery back to the grid is like loaning out your car to the general public... You had better be paid princely for the "miles" they put on your vehicle, in this case, the charge-discharge cycles put on the battery.
Most vehicles are not wired to allow this at residential level - the J1772 standard doesn't allow the vehicle to pump inverted AC power out, although that would be a neat trick (and probably feasible in future cars). The crutch required with current tech would be some expensive DC Fast Charge-based inverter you plug into at night which can go bidirectional at the request of the grid - charge the EV over DC when appropriate and pull DC from the vehicle, invert and feed into a grid-tie system much like solar or wind.
The next best thing may be load trimming, which eMotorWorks has in the form of JuiceNet - juicenet compatible J1772 chargers can trim the available current as needed to create a large-scale electrical load shedding system.
Using your EV as a battery backup (Score:3)
You nailed the problems on the head. Using an EV to supply battery back to the grid is like loaning out your car to the general public... You had better be paid princely for the "miles" they put on your vehicle, in this case, the charge-discharge cycles put on the battery.
Sure there is a cost to that but if the price is right then so what? You're certainly right that there is a wear and tear cost to cycling the battery but that's fine if the economics of it work for all parties involved. In a high demand situation (hot day with everyone's AC going) I could see it making more economic sense than to fire up a peaker plant or similar. I don't think it would make sense as an every day go to solution but I could see it being a sometimes solution for some situations once there
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I'm honestly kind of irritated nobody is seriously trying to do it already from EVs. ...
It is done in Europe since a decade.
It is called SmartGrid using SmartMeters
Not available most places yet (Score:2)
It is done in Europe since a decade.
No it hasn't been done for a decade in Europe or anywhere else. There have been some baby steps in the last 2-3 years. Nissan [electrek.co] and some others have been working on the problem recently but we're just now seeing early versions of the technology roll out. I am not aware of any technology for a Tesla or Bolt EV that would permit direct use of the traction battery to power your home much less the grid. This isn't because it isn't possible but just because they haven't bothered to work on the the problem.
Hone
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No it hasn't been done for a decade in Europe or anywhere else.
Yes it has. I worked on such projects.
Obviously they still are research projects. About 1000 cars are involved in Germany.
Research projects = not available (Score:2)
Yes it has. I worked on such projects.
Really? What equipment could I buy in 2009 that would allow me to power my home from a traction battery from any EV available at the time. You claim that it's been worked on for a decade. Bear in mind that the Nissan Leaf wasn't even on the market in 2009, the Chevy Bolt EV was 8 years away, and the Tesla Model S wasn't available until 2012. Hell show me what I could buy off the shelf in 2015 to power my home from the traction battery of my EV.
Obviously they still are research projects. About 1000 cars are involved in Germany.
That means it hasn't been done. I don't give a shit about r
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A SmartMeter and SmartCharger from Siemens, obviously you need an internet connection, and a power company involved in using your SmartMeter/SmartCharger.
That means it hasn't been done. I don't give a shit about research projects.
If it was a 1000 cars around 2005, then most certainly there are far more now.
and still isn't anything widely available to power my home from an EV traction battery despite it being technologically not all that challenging.
This is for 90% of the world completely irrelevant. Either
More unsupported claims (Score:2)
A SmartMeter and SmartCharger from Siemens, obviously you need an internet connection, and a power company involved in using your SmartMeter/SmartCharger.
Siemens makes chargers for powering your EV at home. If they sell a device that let's you power your home from an EV they are doing a good job of hiding it from the internet. There literally is no mechanism in most EVs for running power out of the EV and into your home. The software in the cars doesn't support power going out from the charge port. Only in the last year or so has that changed for a handful of cars. My Chevy Bolt EV cannot do it in stock form no matter what I plug into it and that's true
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If it was a 1000 cars around 2005, then most certainly there are far more now.
The whole thing sounds highly dubious. If there were 1000 cars involved in 2005, it would be easy to provide a reference. So please do so.
Lithium batteries basically weren't used for cars in 2005. Nickel chemistries are bad enough for electric vehicles in general, but they are completely unsuitable for vehicle to grid. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] "The Roadster was the first highway legal serial production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells". That was in 2008.
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Again: I did not say home power. I said: feed back power into the grid. Sorry if there was a misunderstanding. I probably was not clear on that.
In Europe powering the home from an EV is not a realistic scenario, power outages only happen in extremely rare circumstances and those are usually so server that the power is gone for days.
Obviously if I say "no power outages", you can take that with a grain of salt. Power is reliable in Europe but let's not pretend blackouts are never a thing there. As said above:
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https://www.press.bmwgroup.com... [bmwgroup.com]
http://www.worldhighways.com/s... [worldhighways.com]
https://www.omv.com/en/sustain... [omv.com]
There are plenty of more links, just google "siemens EnBW car charging joint venture"
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Your links contain zero references to V2G infrastructure. It is all about being able to plug your car in anywhere and being able to pay for the power. Great, but not at all on topic.
(If only they succeeded. The non-Tesla high speed charging infrastructure in most of Europe is a joke. And non-Teslas can't use the Tesla grid.)
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What is V2G infrastructure? I don't recognize V2G ...
The non-Tesla high speed charging infrastructure in most of Europe is a joke. And non-Teslas can't use the Tesla grid. ...
No idea about that. As Europe has probably 1000 times more EVs than the US, no idea what you want to imply. I can not charge my Nissan at a Tesla plug? Well, we only have one plug here and Teslas come with adaptors
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What is V2G infrastructure? I don't recognize V2G ...
The original thread went:
"Most vehicles are not wired to allow this at residential level - the J1772 standard doesn't allow the vehicle to pump inverted AC power out, although that would be a neat trick (and probably feasible in future cars)."
The reply was
"I'm honestly kind of irritated nobody is seriously trying to do it already from EVs."
And then you wrote
"It is done in Europe since a decade."
That is V2G, Vehicle to Grid, allowing cars to supply power instead of just charging. It has NOT been done in Euro
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Obviously will work better once there is a mas
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not below 75%? We don't normally charge our Model 3 to above 75%.
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Biomass is renewable in that you can generate more biomass...
If your criteria is wether a source produces co2 or not, then replace biomass with nuclear.
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That would be best, yes.
Renewables and variability (Score:5, Informative)
Renewable capacity is not really comparable to fossil fuel power station capacity because the coal / gas ones can run 24/7...
I don't know if you've ever been offshore in the North Sea but the wind blows there about as close to 24/7 as you are likely to find. Same thing with most hydro power - dams are quite predictable and steady at large scale. Geothermal is super steady. You really are just talking about solar and to a lesser extent on-shore wind. Sure solar is variable and wind to a lesser extent but with built in battery buffers and enough capacity that can be mitigated. And that variability can be an asset in the right circumstances. Solar power is a fantastic fit for use cases like refrigeration and AC which tend to draw the most power exactly when the sun is shining the brightest. Plus once you get enough renewables installed to the grid they statistically balance out and proved effectively a baseload. The wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere and you can route the power from there to where it is needed.
It's more than possible to power most needs of a typical house with a solar roof and a large battery pack. Coal and gas have their utility and are going to be with us for a while but the whole baseload argument really is not supported by the facts unless you (wrongly) assume we aren't going to make any changes to the grid. Plus if you need a constant carbon free power source nuclear is more than capable. I wouldn't call it clean per-se and it certainly isn't renewable, but it's arguably less dangerous than fossil fuels on grid scale.
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...dams are quite predictable and steady at large scale. Geothermal is super steady.
Unfortunately, promoters of renewables exclude hydro and geothermal from their advertising because in most countries they have historically opposed dams and geothermal. Of course, they sneak the big generation figures from those sources back in when they want to brag about their percentage of renewable generation in their country because those baseload sources dwarf what wind and solar can produce.
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What is also maddening is the bias against nuclear power as a "zero carbon" energy source. Nuclear isn't really zero carbon but then neither is wind or solar. If these people were honest with themselves and truly concerned about the environment then they'd embrace nuclear power as much as wind and solar.
I see the future of energy as a mix largely made up of wind, hydro, and nuclear. All these energy sources are very low technology. The machines we build for harnessing this energy has not changed signifi
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Plus once you get enough renewables installed to the grid they statistically balance out and proved effectively a baseload. ...
Don't say that. The troll herd will only flame you and call you an idiot. Worth: americans don't even know what baseload means
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Great work != knowing what baseload is :D
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Then there is tidal power. It's not 24/7, but has the big advantage of being predictable.
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It's more than possible to power most needs of a typical house with a solar roof and a large battery pack.
I agree. I did the math on this one time just to amuse myself. In the summer I calculated I'd have plenty of sunshine to run air conditioning and likely have ample left over to charge up an electric vehicle for my commute. In the winter I'd have enough electricity for all my appliances but I'd need natural gas heating and a hydrocarbon fueled vehicle.
The problem was the cost. This was not a trivial matter. The cost of the solar panels and the batteries would have exceeded the cost of the house. My pay
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So what? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know how much time you've spent offshore, but sea spray is highly corrosive and requires constant maintenance to keep things made of metal and carbon fiber and fiberglass from literally falling apart in a matter of a few years.
Got any more off topic strawmen you'd like to eviscerate? Yes they require maintenance. So what? You think coal or gas plants require no maintenance? Those boilers don't magically run without some serious upkeep. Maintenance is a cost for every form of power generation. Nuclear plants have huge maintenance costs. At the end of the day the maintenance is just one factor among many in determining the economic viability. Increased maintenance is (often more than) offset buy not having to buy any fuel stocks.
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I don't know how much time you've spent offshore, but sea spray is highly corrosive and requires constant maintenance to keep things made of metal and carbon fiber and fiberglass from literally falling apart in a matter of a few years.
Got any more off topic strawmen you'd like to eviscerate? Yes they require maintenance. So what? You think coal or gas plants require no maintenance? Those boilers don't magically run without some serious upkeep. Maintenance is a cost for every form of power generation. Nuclear plants have huge maintenance costs. At the end of the day the maintenance is just one factor among many in determining the economic viability. Increased maintenance is (often more than) offset buy not having to buy any fuel stocks.
There's an enormous difference in maintenance. Fossil plants maintenance patterns are usually around 10 days annually, and 21-45 days every other year, in a centralized location with easy personal vehicle and truck access. Offshore wind needs basically continual maintenance due to the large number of machines- once you finish all of them you need to go back to the first one. This is on hundreds of individual towers, possibly hundreds of miles offshore, requiring an enormous offshore crane and extensive s
Keep missing the point (Score:2)
There's an enormous difference in maintenance.
There is also a difference in the cost of fuel stocks. $0 for renewables versus $HUGE for fossil plants. You seem to be missing the point. The only number that matters at the end of the day is the total cost. (including externalities of pollution that fossil fuel plants never are forced to fully pay for) It doesn't matter if wind costs more to maintain if the cost of a watt delivered is similar or less. You're trying to imply that wind power has these huge maintenance costs but the fact is that the ac
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Case in point: the Rampion wind farm, clearly visible from Brighton despite all bollocks spouted to smooth ruffled feathers about spoiled sea views, has an overall operational lifespan of 10 years. It took 3 years to build it in the first place, most of which was erecting the towers. By the time it was completed, the earliest ones had already been corroding away nicely for a fifth of that lifespan without having produced a single mW...
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That's why I'd make all of that oceanic stuff out of CFRP, carbon fiber reinforced plastic. FRP using nylon fibers has been common since the 1970s. And, of course, aluminum. When it's not subjected to abrasion it is highly corrosion resistant. But I'd focus on using recycled plastic. You can use low-quality plastic because you're building big chunky funky structures in which pinholing is irrelevant.
re abrasion (Score:2)
Sounds like an interesting material to use, would the wave actionand wind driven sea spray abrade it however?
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I can point to numerous nuclear power plants that have run without issue for 40 year, and many of them are expected to run safely and profitably for another 40 years. A new nuclear power plant built today, with what we learned from 60 years of building nuclear reactors, would be expected to run for at least a century.
A wind farm running for 25 years is impressive if we ignore that nuclear and hydro power will last for 4 times longer. I have nothing really against wind power, it's cheap, low tech, availabl
Re:Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky (Score:5, Informative)
Not that traditional power plants don't have their problems. Coal and some types of gas-fired plants simply cannot be fired up quickly enough to respond to sudden spikes in demand, but since you can usually find a use for any excess are often left to at least idle 24/7, even if the energy produced is essentially being dumped. What's needed is diversification of sources, both geographically and by type, with an emphasis on deprecating the least economical and highest polluting power plants first. That's been the UK's strategy for some years now, but these things do take time, and as you say, there is still a long way to go before we can completely remove any need for fossil fuels from the system.
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Coal and some types of gas-fired plants simply cannot be fired up quickly enough to respond to sudden spikes in demand,
That is not how the grid works.
First of all it usually always has enough reserve that a (several!) failing power plant can be substituted by the rest of the others.
Secondly, there are no sudden spikes in demand. Grid operators perfectly know when a spike is to be expected (both ways).
Thirdly, there is a fleet of plants called "reserve power", and yes: they can be spun up in a matter of 30
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No sudden spikes in demand you say? While there are indeed people who spend all their time in the system operators trying not to be caught out, those spikes certainly exist and are not entirely predicable in size or timing.
On the GB grid, the "TV pickup" remains a real effect, in the middle of and and the end of popular TV programmes and sports events. We can even estimate the popularity of our various royals by the size of the pickup when their weddings finish...
Rgds
Damon
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On the GB grid, the "TV pickup" remains a real effect, in the middle of and and the end of popular TV programmes and sports events.
And guess what: those spikes are predicted by the grid operators. So they are not "sudden" in the strict sense of the word.
You could say a goal in soccer is unpredictable and during the slow motion repeats the wife goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge and 1 minute later hundred thousands of fridges start cooling. But then again: you have half a minute or even a minute tim
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Unthinkable? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who, a few years ago, couldn't predict that renewable capacity would overtake fossil fuels' hasn't been paying attention. True: past performance is no indication of future results; but the trend has been clear for quite a few years now.
Re:Unthinkable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who, a few years ago, couldn't predict that renewable capacity would overtake fossil fuels' hasn't been paying attention.
People have been predicting the overtaking for a long time. The problem is that there is a lot of money in oil, gas and other ways of causing pollution. That is why big oil get massive subsidies but grants for things lest likely to ruin the planet are being cut wherever some types of politicians are in control....
The good news is that renewables can be "rich people friendly" too and there is actually progress like this.
Making money (Score:3)
The good news is that renewables can be "rich people friendly" too and there is actually progress like this.
That's my usual response to people who are ideologically against renewable energy. I just ask them "are you against making money?" because they almost invariably are conservatives who would sell their own mother for a tax break. They either have to admit they are just arguing against it because of tribalism (they don't like tree huggers) or they have to admit they don't understand the economics involved. It's obvious that there is huge profit to be made in renewable energy technology and that the technol
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Anyone who, a few years ago, couldn't predict that renewable capacity would overtake fossil fuels' hasn't been paying attention. True: past performance is no indication of future results; but the trend has been clear for quite a few years now.
True that. But the deniers here on Slashdot are still denying.
Capacity != generation (Score:5, Informative)
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are you as good at understanding those reports ...?
In this instance he's basically correct, and although I might take issue with the separation of on and off-shore wind generation, thereby enabling him to state that bio-energy sits in second place when it comes to overall generation the report does also separate them in this way. He also munged all bio-energy into a single figure dismissed as burning imported wood - but, in fairness, since this does make up about 65% of bio-energy production it's hard not to share his dissatisfaction / disdain for the situa
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Next breakthrough needed is in energy storage (Score:4, Interesting)
Compressed air [lowtechmagazine.com] seems to be more economical than batteries today. Utilities would prefer this because, we would still need the grid.
Molten salt idea is to melt common salt using solar energy and keep it in underground tanks, and boil water off the stored energy to run steam turbines when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. It involves basic thermodynamics and heat to mechanical energy conversion. So its efficiency is not great. It might come back to bite. Again utilities like this because we would still need the grid.
The Li-Ion battery prices are following a 7 year half life curve. We are at the cusp 100 $/kWh at pack level magic number right now. Tesla claims it is at 120$/kWh at pack level and below 100$/kWh in cell level. Others are close or ahead. Even at this price, batteries can stabilize the grid and take care of sudden changes in wind or solar generation. It has already saved Southern Australian grid several million dollars in the spot market for electricity. And with some financial engineering and capitalization of revenue streams, solar panel companies are viable in many places where the utility prices are high. At around 80$/kWh at pack level most middle class homes will be able to choose the grid or panel+batteries for their home. As prices drop below that level, affluent people will start dropping off the grid, (like affluent commuters dropped off public transportation in the 1960s and bus/tram lines collapsed in 1970s). This is the scary situation for the electric utility companies. Cost for remaining customers go up, and more people drop off the grid. When will the batteries be at 65$/kWh at pack level? If Elon Musk's secret master plan is right [tesla.com], it is just 7 Elon years from now. Like N Dog years = 7*N human years, N Elon years = N+6 human years. So we are looking at 2031 for this price for batteries.
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Battery chemistry (Score:3)
The Li-Ion battery prices are following a 7 year half life curve. We are at the cusp 100 $/kWh at pack level magic number right now. Tesla claims it is at 120$/kWh at pack level and below 100$/kWh in cell level.
Bear in mind that for grid level power, Li-Ion is not the only or even necessarily best type of battery to use. There are cheaper batteries that are bulkier but have good characteristics for grid power. Li-Ion is popular because its power to weight ratio is good but if we don't care about that lots of other battery chemistries become viable. Tesla is using Li-Ion because they are trying to achieve economies of scale with that technology for their vehicle production with a dual use technology so it makes
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There are better chip technologies than Si for various uses. Yet everyone is on silicon, because economies of scale left everything else behind on old slow processes.
Same thing for the various alternatives to NAND flash. The amount of money dumped into making amazing NAND flash has kept everything else uncompetitive.
It is possible that flow batteries or something else non-Lithium will one day be used for grid storage. I doubt it though. The Lithium chemistries are improving at an impressive rate, and they a
Good is too vague a term (Score:2)
There are better chip technologies than Si for various uses. Yet everyone is on silicon, because economies of scale left everything else behind on old slow processes.
Better is too vague a term to be useful because you have to define how it is better. Cheaper? Performance? Manufacturability? Supply? Yes Gallium Arsenide chips (for example) have better performance characteristics but has worse economics (silicon is cheap) and is harder to manufacture (read expensive).
Also be careful about making analogies like that. There already are pretty substantial economies of scale on other battery chemistries AND there is evidence that other chemistries could become dominant in
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HFT in the energy markets is about as useful as HFT in stock markets- not very much.
HFT is useful as arbitrage. It provides better prices for the rest of the market.
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Why is Microsecond scale stabilisation not needed? Its a vast improvement on the current situation where the grid operators have to guess when there are going to be spikes i.e. check the TV schedule for large events. Horses did the jobs that cars now do so cars aren't needed.
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Most developed world grids (a) don't have government-funded entities deliberately gaming the system and price gouging which is the claim that I've heard recently about SA and (b) have historically have more mass of spinning turbine which has supplied the very short-term ability to ride out spikes and troughs in demand as a lucky side-effect. Synthetic inertia and frequency support are the opposite of HFT as entirely a smoothing effect not speculative/leveraged (and I've worked in HFT).
Rgds
Damon
The nameplate capacity scam (Score:2)
Solar and wind generators are rated by the maximum capacity of the source. These 'nameplate' values add up fast for factory-built technologies, but what happens when that solar panel spends most of its time sitting under a white, drizzling British sky?
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Solar and wind generators are rated by the maximum capacity of the source.
No they are not. How would that even remotely be possible to work?
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Gosh, what would we do without you? National Grid must be kicking themselves for not measuring actual generation, as well as capacity. Except of course they are...
must be missing something (Score:2)
However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations.
So by "surpasses" you mean "didn't surpass"?
Biomass is a fucking scam (Score:4, Insightful)
It mostly just means burning wood in old coal plants for massive subsidies. It's a complete dead end. Hideously expensive, unscaleable, with massive transport costs burning lots of fossil fuel.
It's only the subsidies which make it profitable, subsidies which should be targeted at something not so utterly retarded and destructive ... but then relying on government on the scale of the EU not being utterly retarded and destructive is a lost cause.
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Oh and I forgot soil depletion ... the profits from this aren't sufficient to have agricultural type soil management, and the EU doesn't care because it's just value signalling and playing nice with lobbyists.
Biomass power just plain destroys soil, we would be better off burning coal.
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Actually, in WWU and UW research, you can grow willow spinneys for biomass (you cut them down every 2-3 years) and it's carbon negative. Plus you keep the soil from blowing away.
But, yes, many current biomass projects, other than forestry and crop waste reclamation and pig farm and sewage reclamation, are massively subsidized.
Scotland alone is a net green energy exporter (Score:2)
This doesn't surprise me, fossil fuels are really expensive.
Heck, in the USA, they would be the most expensive if we didn't artificially subsidize them with "mix" requirements for utiilities, cheaper rates for industry, tax exemptions for fossil fuel vehicle fleets, tax deductions and depreciation schemes all of which prop up a dying industry.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Informative)
Found it:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-... [bbc.co.uk]
And my comment:
A GBP1bn wind-farm.
"It can generate 659 megawatts"
Current price paid on the energy markets per megawatt-hour: GBP65.36 (Source: https://www.apolloenergy.co.uk... [apolloenergy.co.uk] - year ahead electricity price for 2018)
GBP1bn will therefore take 1,000,000,000 / 65.36 =
15,299,877 hours to pay back, at full generative capacity. 15,299,877 hours = 637,495 days = 1,746 years.
So... if this windfarm is able to run at full capacity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, until the year 3764, without any further ongoing costs, then it might just pay back the amount it cost to build.
You forgot to divide by the 659 MW, which changes things to a 2.65 year payback at 100% capacity factor. At a more realistic capacity factor, the payback period is probably between 5 and 7 years. That's on par for most power plants. The maintenance will start to really hit at the 8-10 year mark though, and may make continued operation nonviable without subsidies.
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Maybe it's arrogance thinking they are smarter than everyone else.
Or both! "Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package."
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Or both! "Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package."
How efficient, huh?
Your math is wrong (Score:2)
GBP1bn will therefore take 1,000,000,000 / 65.36 =
15,299,877 hours to pay back, at full generative capacity.
15,299,877 hours = 637,495 days = 1,746 years.
You forgot to divide the megawatts out to get to units of just hours.
GBP 1B / 65.36 GBPperMWh / 659 MW = 23,216 hours or around 2.65 years payback.
Re: (Score:3)
So, who is the bigger idiot?
The people who set up 1B GP wind parks?
Or the guys who are bad in math?
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Oooooo! I know, I know!!!
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Yes, he is out by a factor of 659. He would have spotted this if he'd have done the maths the other way round: "how much money does a 659mW windfarm running full tilt generate over a given period at £65.36 per mW?"
In 1 hour: £65.36*659 = £43k
In 24 hours: £1.033m
In 1 year: £377m
In 3 years: £1.13bn
In 1,746 years: £281bn...
If my 10 year old daughter made that kind of basic mistake in her math problems, I'd be pretty pissed off with her.
Re: (Score:3)
sigh (Score:2)
Yet another AC agw/climate change denier spouting from behind a cloak of anonymity. grow some courage and stop being aonymous then people may be able to believe anything you write or link to.