When the Wind Stops Blowing, an Energy Storm Brews (thetimes.co.uk) 132
An anonymous reader shares a report (paywalled): Gas made up the largest share of the UK's energy mix in 2020, at 34%; followed by wind on a quarter; nuclear at 17%; biomass at 6.5% and solar at 4.4%. Despite the progress of renewables, detractors note the problems arise when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Until reliable battery storage for renewable energy is developed, these sources can only ever be intermittent, critics argue, and some infrastructure will continue to use oil for back-up generation. It is a case made by the nuclear industry, which says that it is uniquely placed to provide the zero-emissions baseload the grid requires. Runaway gas prices are already sparking concern across the energy sector, with fears that consumers are facing a "bill shock" this winter. Personal finance expert Martin Lewis warned his readers last week: "This autumn's signature noise will be a deep thud... the sound of jaws hitting the floor as people finally see the practical evidence of the energy bill catastrophe laid bare."
UK gas prices reached 130p per therm last week, compared to 30p a year ago. In an unusual inversion, gas prices are trading above the equivalent price of Brent, the benchmark for crude oil. Both supply and demand factors are at play. The reopening of economies after Covid lockdowns has pushed up demand for gas. Countries are also trying to cut their use of coal, and switching to less polluting gas as a result. Europe is thus competing with Asia for shipments of liquid natural gas (LNG), a more mobile form of gas that is increasingly popular. Supply is also tight: a particularly cold winter meant Europe used up more reserves than usual and these have not been replenished. A spate of outages at gas production plants in different parts of the world have compounded the problem. To make matters worse, the UK has relatively low levels of gas storage. The country has eight gas storage sites that can hold an estimated 12 days of supply. Storage capacity was drastically reduced when the Rough site under the North Sea was closed in 2017 for safety and economic reasons. Rough, a disused oil field, could hold around 70% of UK gas reserves. "The market hasn't been able to fill up storage as we move into this winter. And hence we are very exposed, especially if it is another cold winter like last year," said James Huckstepp, analyst at S&P Platts. "Consumers are starting to recognise that their energy bills are going to be much higher this winter."
UK gas prices reached 130p per therm last week, compared to 30p a year ago. In an unusual inversion, gas prices are trading above the equivalent price of Brent, the benchmark for crude oil. Both supply and demand factors are at play. The reopening of economies after Covid lockdowns has pushed up demand for gas. Countries are also trying to cut their use of coal, and switching to less polluting gas as a result. Europe is thus competing with Asia for shipments of liquid natural gas (LNG), a more mobile form of gas that is increasingly popular. Supply is also tight: a particularly cold winter meant Europe used up more reserves than usual and these have not been replenished. A spate of outages at gas production plants in different parts of the world have compounded the problem. To make matters worse, the UK has relatively low levels of gas storage. The country has eight gas storage sites that can hold an estimated 12 days of supply. Storage capacity was drastically reduced when the Rough site under the North Sea was closed in 2017 for safety and economic reasons. Rough, a disused oil field, could hold around 70% of UK gas reserves. "The market hasn't been able to fill up storage as we move into this winter. And hence we are very exposed, especially if it is another cold winter like last year," said James Huckstepp, analyst at S&P Platts. "Consumers are starting to recognise that their energy bills are going to be much higher this winter."
Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't wind or solar as much here as the very high prices of natural gas right now. But this is the sort of thing we can solve. More nuclear for baseline, and more wind and solar, along with more tidal and geothermal along with more transmission lines so we can move power more effectively. For example, the Orkney Islands have far more wind power than they need, but they have limited ability to transmit it to the mainland (they are working on it). Similarly, in the US, there are three major grids, East, West and Texas, and there's an ongoing project to be able to send power between the grids Tres Amigas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation [wikipedia.org]. When this is done, California will be able to send their extra solar, Iowa's extra wind and Texas's extra wind will all be able to compensate for when the other two are down.
And we really do need to do this soon. We're already seeing problems from climate change. No matter what happens at this point, we're going to have some pretty bad results. What we do now determines how bad, and if we ever have time to really do geoengineering.
Re:Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is wind and solar because wind and solar are so extremely intermittent, that they require a very large amount of suitable power source to fill the gaps in intermittency.
Brits chose the best option that exists on the market to fill that gap, a large array of modern CCGTs some of which can operate in OCGT cycle if necessary for rapid taking of the load.
Nuclear doesn't work well in the same grid as a lot of intermittents, because nuclear is troublesome to spin up and spin down. The optimal usage scenario for nuclear is to get it spun up and then just run at optimal capacity for a long period of time. That makes it excellent base power, but a poor fit for backing up wind and solar when they inevitably fail for the third time this week.
It's why anti-scientific greens hate it. It's simply a better as a clean power source then their two favourite fetishes and it effectively makes them unviable. It also doesn't exactly help that a lot of Green parties across the world trace their roots directly from anti-nuclear movements of Cold War.
Re:Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:5, Insightful)
Gas prices are high, therefore blame wind because it doesn't replace gas 100% of the time?
Derptastic analysis.
Nuclear doesn't work well in the same grid as a lot of intermittents, because nuclear is troublesome to spin up and spin down.
Complete nonsense. Wind generators can be turned off at any time, so this is a completely false impediment to connecting the systems.
You're say anything to support your pre-existing conclusions, it doesn't matter even the tiniest bit if the thing is true. You just throw anything at the wall.
greens
The Green Party have absolutely nothing to do with this subject, which is public utility engineering, not politics.
Re:Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:5, Insightful)
> Complete nonsense. Wind generators can be turned off at any time, so this is a completely false impediment to connecting the systems.
True.
Unfortunately that means you're using expensive nuclear power instead of practically-free wind while the wind is available, because you *have* to shut the wind turbines down to prevent overproduction.
This is why nuclear and renewables are antagonistic, not synergistic.
=Smidge=
Re:Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you build a bunch of it.
I'm certainly not advocating that.
I'm simply saying that however much nuclear you build, there is no trouble also connecting wind and solar to the same grid. It's just a stupid lie that armchair nuclear boosters trot out to try to make it look like wind and solar are not feasible. But they're decades too late to be playing that trick.
There is nothing antagonistic about the technologies at all. There is not some massive surplus of wind power being generated. It's just another lie.
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You keep saying that, but you can't back it up with anything.
Whereas antagonism between stable, slow to spin up base power and intermittents is widely understood and planned around in building up power grids. And has been for decades. It's one of the fundamental things to design a stable grid around.
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The situation is so bad for nuclear that the government has to guarantee the price of energy it generates. Even when other sources are paying people to use electricity, nuclear gets its very high price (around 3x subsidy free wind). Guess where the money comes from.
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UK's exit from the EU's Internal Energy Market [bbc.co.uk]
How it could affect prices [moneysupermarket.com]
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Indeed, and it's been compounded by one of the key interconnects catching fire.
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
Re:Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:5, Insightful)
> I'm simply saying that however much nuclear you build, there is no trouble also connecting wind and solar to the same grid.
Again; technically correct, but whether or not you can connect wind to a nuclear-powered grid is not the problem - over production is the problem. You have it exactly backwards.
Specifically, you will be forced to disable the cheapest, most environmentally friendly power first because nuclear lacks sufficient flexibility. That is wasteful and negates the most valuable and worthwhile aspect of renewable power. It defeats the whole point.
> There is not some massive surplus of wind power being generated.
Yet. At least not in the UK; excess wind power in mainland Europe is common, to the point where retail prices can go negative in an effort to get people to take the excess power of their hands. There will be a problem if you continue to expand wind power installation while insisting you also build nuclear power to cover the times when wind power isn't sufficient.
This isn't complicated; Let's say you need 1000 gigawatts of power, for sake of example. You install 400 gigwatts (nameplate) of wind, so logically you might think you need 600 gigawatts of nuclear to make up for it, right? 400 + 600 = 1000.
Except, of course, that 400 GW of wind will not always be producing 400GW. Some times you might only get, say, 300 GW. Now you're 100 GW in the hole. Okay, you might think, just build another 100 GW worth of nuclear and you're covered!
So what happens when your wind farm *does* produce 400 GW? ow you're producing 1100 GW total, and that's bad. You can't shave 100 GW worth of nuclear in the span of minutes that would be necessary to prevent overloading the grid, so your only recourse is to disable some of that wind power.
You now have 100GW of wind energy going untapped. 25% of your wind turbines are going completely to waste, because you had to turn them off. While the wind continues to blow, you're passing up cheap energy in favor of stupidly expensive energy, while also ruining the economics of your wind farms.
This is why nuclear and wind - and other renewables like solar, though to a lesser extent - are at odds with each other. This is why, instead of building nuclear power plants that cost a fortune and have tons of externalities, we should instead be investing in storage technologies to make the best use of energy when it's abundant, and diversifying the grid to level out the variations.
=Smidge=
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You just need to have adequate crypto mining capacity available to suck up any excess energy. See crypto currency is good for something after all.
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Coal cannot. As bad as nuclear is, coal is a lot worse ; it can take days for a coal plant to throttle up and down.
Oil is, depending on how it's implemented, almost as bad as coal or way too expensive to be deployed widely enough to matter.
The reality is gas turbines makes up the difference, but since doing away with fossil fuel power is the whole point, that really only leaves nuclear on the table for discussion purposes.
=Smidge=
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That depends a lot on the type of coal plant, and even then typically the minimum load is 70%-80% of nameplate which in the grand scheme of things isn't that flexible.
If we're talking coal plants in the US then the average capacity is somewhere around ~1,500 MW, so 300-400MW worth of throttling. That's just about one wind farm installation's worth. e.g. not a lot for the grid as a whole. As renewable power capacity continues to expand it's going to quickly overwhelm your coal plant's throttle limits, and no
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I am not adverse to expanding renewable power, but the real problem at this point is still backup power. Wind/solar/hydro are not always available at anything approaching rated full load. Without either viable storage systems or fossil-fuel/nuclear backup, there are going to be times when there is just not enough power in a region, and there is no
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> Why is nobody talking about mass power storage?
It's been mentioned several times in this thread...
=Smidge=
End the subsidies (Re:Problem isn't wind or solar) (Score:2)
If wind is that unreliable then it is not cheap. I've been begging people to tell me how much renewable energy with storage costs so we can get a fair comparison with nuclear power. I finally got an answer the other day, it's $150 per MWh, which means it costs more than nuclear power.
If wind can't provide power to the grid when needed then why are we using it again? Because it is lower cost? Lower in CO2 emissions? More plentiful? It's none of these things. I'm a fan of onshore wind because when used
Re: Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:2)
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Hydro is great, but it has some specific requirements: The geography needs to be right, and you need the supply of water. You could in theory build inland reservoirs and fill them with seawater as pumped hydro, but this has limitations plus a risk of contaminating local ground and surface water with the salt... plus all the other hassles of dealing with sea water. Otherwise pumped hydro is probably the best solution if the location is right.
Otherwise I generally advocate battery storage as second best, with
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The article is about the UK. The UK (well mostly Scotland) has huge potential for pumped storage. I think Corie Glas is finally going ahead. The there is the expansion of Ben Cruachan, a scheme in Glenmuckloch and the Red John at Dores on Loch Ness.
There is another scheme I think in north Wales near Dinorwig and back in the day there was a scheme for Exmoor. There are basically no shortage of options for pumped storage in the UK.
There is also huge tidal potential in the UK too.
Back in the day there
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The problem is that nuclear power is expensive.
When you build a new nuclear plant now you will already struggle to be competitive in price.
If you would use this nuclear plant to only provide 'base load' and ramp it up when wind and solar are not delivering enough the price for the nuclear power becomes prohibitive.
So, as mentioned above, as soon as a nuclear power plant is involved it gets priority. That means that in an overproduction scenario it will be the wind and solar that will have to power down. Eve
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CO2 from wind (Re:Problem isn't wind or solar) (Score:2)
The concrete for a nuclear power plant is a one-off CO2 emitter too, just like windmills. The difference is that a nuclear power plant will produce power at 90% of rated output year after year, for decades, giving as low life cycle CO2 emissions as wind.
Comparing wind power to gasoline does not follow because so very little electricity is used for transportation and yet nearly all gasoline is used for transportation. These are two different sectors that have very little overlap, so one does little to offs
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Gas prices are high, therefore blame wind because it doesn't replace gas 100% of the time?
Derptastic analysis.
It's actually pretty legitimate to blame wind in this case. Winds in the north of Europe, the wind that is supposed to be "always blowing," has dramatically underperformed for an extended period. To a surprising degree. I'm sure in a few months that will be blamed on some kind of climate change induced event. but the practical matter is a giant chunk of renewable power dropped off the grid. Unfortunately Europe isn't the only place this is happening, it's worldwide... hydro shortages in the American Wes
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The adding of Grid Storage will solve both the Nuclear baseload and intermittent Wind problems.
Ideally what needs to happen is that energy can be stored from one season to another season. This allows very windy days to add to the energy storage and Nuclear can just run at max output on low demand days.
Batteries are good for short-term storage but poor for long-term storage. I am not a fan of hydrogen but hydrogen could potentially be used as a long-term storage medium. Industrial electrolysis would be used
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Supply variability is a real problem when the demand is inelastic. Demand will be inelastic whenever consumers are insulated from price changes.
Real-time variable rate pricing technology has been around for 20 years. Roll it out and watch demand magically become elastic!
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Basic needs do not easily adjust with price because you still have a basic need for them that you will prioritize fulfilling before anything else. You still need that power, you still need that water, you still need that food, you still need that transportation.
The thing you want works best for luxuries and worst for basic needs.
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Ok so figure out how many kilowatt-hours per month a person needs in order to survive, and sell those for a fixed, low price. For me, it would be about 55 kWh per month to run my refrigerator so my food doesn't spoil, plus a few more for lights and phone chargers.
Or if I were willing to invest in a chest freezer and convert it into a refrigerator [builditsolar.com], I would only ne
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It's infinitely hilarious to me how far leftists always end up at the same point, no matter what route they take.
Soviet Communists - poor people are wasteful - food quotas.
Western Greens - poor people are wasteful - power quotas.
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If you don't care about helping the poor, then stop pretending like you do, troll.
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I'm not a far leftist. I'm a leftist. So I actually do care about it, and I do volunteer work that aligns with my principles.
That's why I find far left to be as abhorrent, as inhumane, as cruel and as destructive as I do. Not only does it pretend to care about poor while it hates them with burning passion, but it also projects this hatred on everyone else.
For example, "we are racist to blacks, therefore everyone who looks like us must be equally racist to blacks". You know, the foundational principle to the
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It's why anti-scientific greens hate it. It's simply a better as a clean power source then their two favourite fetishes
You were doing really well until the last paragraph, and then your post degenerated into name calling. Let's stick to discussing facts, ok?
You're right that nuclear has issues with intermittent sources. It's good for providing baseline power, but the whole concept of baseline is disappearing. In places with a lot of wind and solar, it already sometimes happens that they meet 100% of the instantaneous demand. That will become more common with time. The baseline is going to zero.
Your solution is to elimi
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You make a quote of my stating a fact, and then you talk about "name calling". There was no name calling in aforementioned quote. "Fetish" is an actual word, with actual meaning, and that meaning is exactly how anti-scientific green movement treats wind and solar. They don't care how suitable they are for the grid or geography of the needs of the people in that location. They're always the solution.
The point stands, and I wholeheartedly reject your malicious attempt at poisoning the well right at the start.
Re:Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:5, Informative)
The UK can't afford nuclear, and can't find anyone to build it. The subsides needed to get companies in board are just eye watering.
We have to solve this but it has to be affordable. What we really need is a proper strategy, not just relying on investors delivering a stable grid. Build more offshore, build more storage. Interconnect with other grids.
Re:Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:4, Informative)
The UK can't afford nuclear, and can't find anyone to build it. The subsides needed to get companies in board are just eye watering.
We have to solve this but it has to be affordable. What we really need is a proper strategy, not just relying on investors delivering a stable grid. Build more offshore, build more storage. Interconnect with other grids.
The UK has a bunch of solutions that we haven't done - we could be investing in tidal energy, for example and the Swansea bay project [tidallagoonpower.com] would make a huge difference. The problem is that, whilst they guarantee subsidised, massively long term prices for nuclear, the government won't even make price guarantees ("contract for difference") for any of the tidal projects.
We could also have grid connections to Norway and bigger ones to Denmark and France and from France, through to Marocco where there's plenty of potential for Concentrated Solar Power. Instead, as you rightly say, we've wasted money and time on failed nuclear projects which we just can't afford. The story is straight propaganda.
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Money for friends of the Tory party in building nuclear, and brexit isolationism screwing up our climate goals.
Green washing (Re:Problem isn't wind or solar) (Score:2)
Government money for wind and solar building is "green washing", vote buying, virtue signalling, corporate welfare, and often screwing up goals to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
There's so much money going into wind and solar that it is driving electricity spot prices negative. This forces large slow moving thermal power plants (coal and nuclear mostly) to choose to pay for the "privilege" of keeping the grid stable, or to shutdown and possibly cause a blackout. The times they pay for these negative price
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I don't think we can rely on those grid connections to the EU as we are out of that energy market too, their own countries will have priority if there is a shortfall across Europe
I don't think [nortonrosefulbright.com] that has much practical effect. The EU is pretty good about integrating with and working with third countries in both directions and has so far been singularly non-vindictive about Brexit despite multiple provocations. I suppose though, you might have a point if the UK keeps wanting to "cut off it's nose to spite it's face". Everyone probably has a tipping point.
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We have built a load of interconnects with other grids. Right now a 2TW interconnect with France is out of action due to a fire, and the other interconnects with the European grid are running at full capacity.
We also have two interconnects with the Irish grid, but they tend to be a net importer of electricity, except with there is a lot of wind, which there isn’t at the moment.
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I thought that looked reasonable from a design/engineering perspective, but I wasn’t sure that the scale of those smaller units made sense given the amount of supporting infrastructure they would need compared with the power they would generate.
But more than that I suspect the biggest single problem in the UK right now is complete incompetence in government.
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No excuse (Re:Problem isn't wind or solar) (Score:2)
Renewables and battery storage costs more than nuclear power. Maybe building renewables and storage is a must given the time needed for more capacity but they can do more than one thing at a time. They can build more renewable energy sources, more storage, and more nuclear fission power plants. Nuclear power plants are proven to be quite durable, with expected operational lives of 80 years. When those windmills and solar panels wear out in 20 years then they will have those nuclear power plants finished
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Why aren't you showing any examples of the prices you're claiming.
Why is it that I have to give examples but everyone that contests my claims do not?
I've showed you previously that solar + storage was cheaper than nukes.
Who are you? You are posting anonymously so I have no clue where to look for this. Where's this evidence? At a minimum you could share this evidence for the rest of the class, I'm not the only person that is going to read this and want to know.
Has it changed? If so, show us.
I doubt it has changed, it's only recently that I've had someone give any idea on how much solar + storage costs. My guess is that the solar shills kept quiet on the costs because i
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The reactors used on the UK's nuclear submarines are highly classified so nobody knows what their capabilities are, although we do know that they are dangerously unsafe: https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
In any case, the highly classified nature means that they are unlikely to be available for civilian power, and chances are the output is too small to be useful anyway, given the likely cost.
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You point to a decade old report on the safety of military nuclear power plants to claim we can't make them safe today? If I posted a link to a decade old article on the safety of wind or solar power then how would the renewable energy shills react to that?
Part of the problem with arguments on nuclear power safety is how few reports are published. Why is that? If nuclear power is so dangerous then should not a new report come out every year, or every month, on how there are so many people killed and inju
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You point to a decade old report on the safety of military nuclear power plants to claim we can't make them safe today?
Yes, because the suggestion was to use that specific reactor for civilian purposes. Try reading the post I replied to.
The report may be a decade old but the reactor design dates back to the early 1960s. The new ones they are proposing to replace them with are an evolution of that design.
Wind and solar were fairly safe a decade ago.
My guess is that nobody wants to publish them because it would look really good for nuclear power.
Or maybe nobody wants to pay to have them written, because we already know the risks.
Those were reactors built from designs out of the 1960s.
In the case of Fukushima the age of the reactor was not the issue.
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Yes, because the suggestion was to use that specific reactor for civilian purposes.
If that specific design is flawed then use the far less flawed designs that replaced it. It's not that hard. The plan to use those reactors is now likely a very old proposal given that the replacement submarines are under construction now, and will use a different reactor. I doubt a plan was to be taken as literally as you took it. I suspect that you know that nobody would take such a proposal seriously and literally if it is known that the reactors suffer from a flaw that could release radiation. A qu
Re: Problem isn't wind or solar (Score:2)
The US, Japanese and French industries have lots of nice paper designs but all the know how for building them is retired.
Russia and China aren't really an option, guess we should get India to build reactors for us?
Price is only a symptom (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't wind or solar as much here as the very high prices of natural gas right now.
That is only one part of it.
The other part of it is, they have to import all of the natural gas they would use. And as even the summary alone noted, they can't hold very much - in a world where shipping anything anywhere is also getting super expensive and unreliable.
That's why nuclear is such a great form of base energy. Not only is it delivering a base of stable power at zero emissions, but you can buy fuel every few years, well ahead of when you need to actually use it - so you have a huge buffer of time to overcome issues in acquiring it elsewhere.
The thing is that the world has made choices in the last few years (and ongoing) that ensure there will be ever increasing costs of power, instability in power grids, and just general power nonsense for years to come.
It's all great news though if you saw it coming and invested in nuclear power, or oil, or coal... even now there still is time to do so before the reality of the entire situation comes upon the governments of the earth, and the bulk of the people under them.
If you claim that is profiting off people's suffering you are wrong; it's profiting off the stupidity of governments. The people were always going to suffer from that so you might as well not be one of the ones suffering, and if you do well enough you can use what you have gained to help others directly.
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Nuclear has considerable emissions in the UK, from the fuel cycle and from plant construction and operation. It's actually quite dirty when it comes to pollution too.
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The waste fuel has emissions because it needs to be stored on-site in pools, and then eventually disposed of.
Developing nations are going to need a lot of power. It can't be nuclear, it's not suitable for them, so we need to demonstrate that other options are viable.
No options (Re:All wrong, rethink your evil ways) (Score:2)
so we need to demonstrate that other options are viable.
There are no other viable options. You are not taking global warming seriously, that is quite clear.
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Are you seriously suggesting that the solution for developing countries is nuclear power?
Seems like we have decided we don't want Iran to have it. Or North Korea. Many countries don't want it anyway, it's too expensive. Not only the cost of the plant and the waste, but the fact that it needs a government regulator to oversee it, with expertise on hand.
Plus many places don't really have anywhere to put it, given the requirements for where nuclear plants can be located.
If nuclear really is the only option the
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Are you seriously suggesting that the solution for developing countries is nuclear power?
Yes.
Seems like we have decided we don't want Iran to have it. Or North Korea.
They can have nuclear power if they want it, but they don't want it. They want to make nuclear weapons. There's an embargo on anything related to nuclear technology with Iran and most any other nations because they have a habit of chanting "Death to America" or whatever nation they feel upset with that day. Also, there are not really any secrets on how to get nuclear power to work. People in 1950s USA were able to get it working when it was pretty much just a theory 10 years earlier. The machines u
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Somehow I think "be America's bitch or no electricity" is not really going to sell it.
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Good thing then that's not what anyone is using to sell it.
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We're already seeing problems from climate change.
Not really.
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UK's energy mix didn't change suddenly over 12mo (Score:2)
Brexit, however, did come into full effect.
The partisan Tory press are trying to make Brexit failures look like something else. Their supermarket shelves are now bare and you want us to believe this UK-only price surge is because of renewable energy, when other regions are also building renewables.
The UK wanted geopolitical isolation and high prices and shortages are the result.
We went through this anti-renewable blame game already with the Texas grid failure.... Slashdot editors should know better.
Seriousl
Wind-energy cost fluctuations (Score:2, Informative)
There's an article in a recent Wall Street Journal issue that charts the price per megawatt of wind-based energy. The wind in the North Atlantic hasn't been very strong recently so the prices have gone up dramatically. People think it's a free resource but it's not. The cost to build and maintain the farms isn't going down or even leveling off. It's always going to go up because the world economy is increasingly becoming a rental economy. We rent or subscribe to pretty much everything in our daily live
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What link is there between wind being lessor in the North Atlantic and a rental economy? None. Far as "free" resource? None. Not a one. All of them require a means of harvesting the resource. The rest is quibbling over the bill and who will pay it.
Life is limited (Score:1)
I don't see nuclear happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately for the nuclear industry, the characteristics of a nuclear powerplant simply don't work in the current conditions.
The whole base load model is the idea that nuclear is very cheap, but inflexible. You generate the part of consumption that doesn't vary much, and fill the peaks with more flexible, more expensive sources.
But it didn't come to be. What is currently the case is that nuclear is far more expensive than the competition. Which means nuclear won't get to be the baseload for economic reasons, because why anybody in their right mind pay 3 times as much buying nuclear power when they could save loads of cash buying from wind or solar instead? So obviously, anybody economically minded will buy renewable any time they're available. However since nuclear isn't particularly flexible, it can't easily take on the role of "fill in the holes when the wind isn't blowing" role either.
The whole dynamic further damages the nuclear business because it's almost all capital costs. Nuclear wants to run 24/7 at 100% or as close as possible. But that won't work if renewables can undercut it. If nuclear can't profit because the wind is blowing and the sun is shining then it's not paying off the loans. Then either payoff time gets much further away, or it must charge more, making its own problems even worse.
IMO the end result is that nuclear is done for. There's just no way for it to make a profit. It can only exist right now if it was subsidized, and unless people voluntarily choose to pay more for their power that's not going to happen.
Another issue is that the system is made of independent actors -- people running a powerplant don't care about grid stability, people paying electricity bills just want the lower price possible, and governments don't want to throw money at a tech that won't start working until they're out of office. IMO the likely result is that nuclear won't happen, renewables will keep growing, grid stability will eventually be impacted, and a bunch of storage and contingency measures will have to be built in a rush.
Re:I don't see nuclear happening (Score:4, Informative)
The UK has bet on nuclear for when the wind doesn't blow, that's part of why they're in trouble. New nuclear power plants are late and way over budget. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] for instance.
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Ouch! They are bingeing on the sunk cost fallacy here!
What they really, really need to do is find the cheapest way to end this and stop the financial bleeding, and allocate the costs for the failure in a socially and morally responsible way.
Re: I don't see nuclear happening (Score:2)
Everyone without lots of hydro is in trouble, it's not like there are any other alternatives at the moment. Even France is going to run out of nuclear with plant closures.
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That's exactly what happened in the UK. Nobody would build new nuclear because it was unprofitable.
I'm the end they got the Chinese to invest and EDF (French) to build the plant, with a guaranteed price for any energy made at several times the going rate for other sources.
It nearly bankrupted EDF but when they finally get that thing running they will be laughing all the way to the bank. They just leave to going, getting paid by the government, while the market rate goes negative.
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That is a nice concise statement of the economic problem.
The non-economic problem is what to do when the wind and solar is not available and the batteries are dead. Do you accept the fossil fuel use for this period, or go to rolling blackouts to stretch what you do have?
Does everyone who can get their own backup generator? They are getting pretty common. I have been known to use an inverter off the truck to keep the refrigerator and the freezer cold during a long power outage. That is certainly inefficient,
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The optimum solution would be to have enough battery storage for one or two average days attached to the grid. In addition, natural gas powered plants would be maintained in serviceable condition to supply the grid in the event that renewables are unavailable for longer than one or two days. There would be a cost to keeping the plants operational. This cost would have to be paid even though the plants don't produce power most of the time. This is the cost of having a reliable grid. Of course you could just
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There is another way. You use renewables to pull CO2 from the air and convert it to methane (natural gas). Then run the grid entirely off of natural gas generation (no batteries). It is not very efficient, but then again it would be nice to not need any batteries. Instead you would build out natural gas storage. It is much cheaper and easier to store natural gas than battery power. But this is not a turnkey solution. The technology is not ready to roll out right now, whereas batteries are.
There are several competing technologies. One issue with traditional batteries is that the production of them is not clean, they use rare metals and are expensive. And conversion to natural gas is not efficient either. A new technology from one of the Danish wind mill pioneers which has now passed the test stage (small test facilities) is to store the energy in a pumped thermal energy storage system using huge tanks with crushed rocks and an advanced heat pump:
https://www.stiesdal.com/stora... [stiesdal.com]
I am pretty su
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For sure synthesizing fuel from CO2 is not energy efficient. But if done very widely, it could remove a lot of CO2 from the air. This could be part of a carbon credit economy. But it would be real carbon accounting, where the carbon is very literally and directly removed from the atmosphere.
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why anybody in their right mind pay 3 times as much buying nuclear power when they could save loads of cash buying from wind or solar instead?
Because nuclear power is reliable while wind and solar are not.
It took some time to find out how much wind and solar with storage cost but I finally heard mention of it on a recent video on energy storage solutions. It turns out that reliable energy from intermittent wind and solar costs more than using nuclear power.
Oh, right, but what shall we do about nuclear power not being able to vary output to match demand? I hear we have all kinds of new energy storage solutions to try out for this. No sane utili
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Nothing is 100% reliable. Nuclear has also downtime. Also, you might have noticed we've built enormous systems of almost perfect uptime out of crappy hardware, by counting on that it will go down and dealing with that problem.
And no, people don't pay more for nuclear. That's why we're having this conversation. If people agreed that the price was worth it for stability, nuclear would be being built, instead of being discussed as something we should be doing.
The UK tried subsidizing it, and nobody is happy wi
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Nothing is 100% reliable. Nuclear has also downtime.
Nuclear capacity factor is 92% and wind/solar is 37/26 % respectively. Moreover nuclear power plant downtime can be scheduled in advance most of the times. Obviously nuclear is doing much better in the reliability department.
And no, people don't pay more for nuclear. That's why we're having this conversation. If people agreed that the price was worth it for stability, nuclear would be being built, instead of being discussed as something we should be doing.
You assume only market forces were at play. But most of the consumers do not have variable rates. They are not even aware of the intermittency problem. Also governments may require prioritizing of renewables (e.g. Ger
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Sure. But nothing is perfectly reliable in any case, so the modern way to handle that is to deal with it. And throwing tons of consumer level tech at it. IMO that's the long term future: mass produced renewables, backed by mass produced storage.
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Nothing is 100% reliable. Nuclear has also downtime.
Nuclear power does not have to be 100% reliable to justify the higher rates they charge.
Maintenance periods for nuclear power plants can be staggered to get to near 100% uptime. Nothing is 100%, there have been cases of earthquakes large enough to trigger an automated scram at multiple nuclear power plants. When your entire country just got moved 3 meters to the left that can cause widespread power outages no matter what the source may be. With solar power there will be outages across a nation quite regu
What about water? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wind and solar are reliable as part of the mix. The past decade has proved this. Water is not the long term unlimited reliable resource needed for current power generation. As wind and solar becomes a bigger part of the pie, storage will become more necessary. But we never run away from innovation just because we donâ(TM)t have everything 100% engineered already.
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Nuclear, combined with salt storage, really is a useful approach. [terrapower.com]
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It's a useful approach if you want to waste money and produce nuclear waste, but sane people don't want to do either of those things.
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> The crisis in Texas last winter was caused by water inlet freezing shutting down the traditional power plants, and the refineries.
More specifically, it was moisture in the natural gas (methane pumped up from the ground is quite humid, especially with fracking operations which use water and other chemicals to force it out). Under the right conditions you get methane hydrate ice which clogs up the works. Texas utilities decided that installing the necessary equipment to safeguard against that wasn't good
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The crisis in Texas last winter was caused by water inlet freezing shutting down the traditional power plants, and the refineries.
Power production from natural gas did not fail in Texas until after rolling blackouts cut power to the pumping stations on the natural gas lines. Half of the pumping stations are powered by burning the natural gas but the other half are powered from the local grid.
Rough well closing (Score:3)
It might have been nice to have filled some storage when the prices were low.
If you're curious about the gas storage problem and are asking "why not reopen", here's a writeup on the Rough site problems.
https://assets.publishing.serv... [service.gov.uk]
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TL;DR It's falling apart. Total rebuild is the only way to keep using the field for storage.
Other sources. (Score:2)
Besides Nuclear, Oil, and natural gas, there are several other solutions to the intermittent nature.
My favorite is tidal. The tide nevers stops, unlike wind or solar. The idea of using electric cars as a distributed battery while they are parked makes some sense. But physical batteries also work. That is, when the sun shines/wind blows, you pump water up to a power reservoir or lift dirt up a gravity power plant. When the clouds sit in the sky, not moving and blocking the sun, you let gravity run yo
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Add to the storage spinwheels, weight elevations, pumping water back to higher reservoirs, storage in hydrogen, ammonia or even synthetic ethanol.
There are several solutions, ones more advanced, others still new born and in need of more refinement... but most still need to be build, as everything was build to store oil or gas... and not, there isn't one size fits all... all those solutions work, some work better on some places, other work better on other places, but you need always to use several solutions
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Lifting mass does work and can be efficient. But it is kind of surprising how much mass you have to lift and how high you have to lift it. My house uses about 30 kWh per day. That 30 kWh of energy is about the same as an the gravitational energy of 80,000 lb weight (two full loaded semi-trucks worth of weight) 1000 feet up in the air. This kind of highlights the problem with using pumped hydro as storage (for long duration lulls in sunlight and wind).
You would need to pump 80,000 lbs of water into a tank 10
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> You would need to pump 80,000 lbs of water into a tank 1000 feet up in the air just to store enough energy to power my house for 24 hours.
For perspective, 80,000 pounds of (fresh) water is only 9,600 gallons. Hydro has a major advantage over "lift a heavy thing" energy storage in that it's very easy and efficient to move many millions of tons of the stuff huge distances. Hydro reservoirs typically measure in the billions of gallons.
=Smidge=
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Yeah. A 10,000 gallon tank is not that big. But my point is that energy storage for one house would require a 10,000 gallon tank 1000 feet in the air. Or it could be 100,000 gallons 100 feet in the air, but I don't think that is any easier. OR it could be done with 400 lbs of batteries and get 2000 cycles out of it. Do you not see my point? I know, pumped hydro reservoirs are big. But can we build enough of them close enough to where the energy is needed to supply even one day of grid power? The answer is n
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> Do you not see my point?
I do see your point, but it's mired by very poor application of logic. There is absolutely an economy of scale here that you are not taking into account: Building a gravity storage system for a single house is ridiculous. Building a gravity storage system (using water) for 10,000+ homes is a fantastic idea.
If, of course, the local geography is suitable. That's really the problem with pumped hydro...
=Smidge=
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The economy of scale doesn't really help matters that much. Or, I mean, you can apply the same economy of scale to batteries. Sure, a vast tall dam can hold a lot of energy. But we would needs 10's of thousands of gallons at hundreds of feet of head for each household the dam serves if we want the dam to power the home for a full day. Meanwhile, 400 lbs of batteries could do the same thing. It just seems obvious that it is never going to be cheaper or better or easier and, more importantly, as you say, no w
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> The economy of scale doesn't really help matters that much.
It absolutely does.
> Or, I mean, you can apply the same economy of scale to batteries.
Yup. One large, central battery installation is going to be a better value than a hundred thousand small installations scattered about. No question.
> But we would needs 10's of thousands of gallons at hundreds of feet of head for each household the dam serves if we want the dam to power the home for a full day.
And that's exactly what hydro dams provide.
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22 GW is the generation capacity of existing PUMPED STORAGE hydro.
I think the key point I am trying to make is that pumped hydro is great for storage, but cannot be expanded easily to satisfy the amount of storage that would be required for a 100% renewable grid.
Batteries are more practical. That is all I am saying.
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In practice, nuclear plants cannot ramp up and down very quickly. That is not how they are operated. Not the ones we have today. Coal is only a little better. When the demand is variable, the plant of choice is natural gas. It is much easier to change the flow of fuel and air into the turbine than it is with coal or nuclear (well, nuclear doesn't have fuel or air flow, but the reaction rate and therefore heat output is controlled by other means.. point is, it cannot be changed rapidly). Of course batteries
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Nuclear reactors can change output quickly, the problem is the steam turbines can't shift output quickly.
To address this issue people are working on thermal energy storage, in molten metal or molten salt, and Brayton cycle gas turbines. These turbines are nearly identical to the internal combustion turbines used for natural gas but they use heat piped in from the thermal energy store instead. Some systems allow for injection of fuel (natural gas, fuel oil, or some "green" alternative) almost like an after
Also, has anyone researched wind depletion? (Score:2)
So, coal? (Re:But the wind never stops, right?) (Score:2)
You expect people to prefer fossil fuels to nuclear power then? That's the case now in places like Japan and Germany where they made the illogical decision to close nuclear power plants and turn to burning coal. That can't go on for long as people complain about air quality and energy costs.
Wind, water, and sun are too intermittent and dilute of energy sources to support an industrial nation. Without fossil fuels or nuclear power we will see nations trade in cars and trains for oxen and horses.