electricity demand is peaking...at 60GW

very interesting stats today.

Coal and gas and nuclear all running pretty much as high as I have ever seen them, and half a gigawatt of wood pellet burner going at Tilbury.

Even a bit of OCGT online somewhere.

France and presumably Germany right on the edge - we are pushing as much as the links will take to the continent.

Everything is up bar the oil burners and a bit of coal and gas still left somewhere.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher
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So why are we exporting power to mainland Europe when our own demand is in the orange region. Is it just commercial pressures ie profit?

As you interesting but I for one don't quite understand.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Minchin

France is short on capacity and so is Germany. Prices spiked up to 15p a unit wholesale. Half Germany's nukes have been taken off line and there is no wind to speak of except a little bit in Scotland. PV doesn't work after dark..

At that price its worth using up precious coal hours to generate, and even crappy OCGT turbines can be profitable.

Essentially the more wind you put on the grid, the more you don't build efficient modern generation to balance them - because it cant make a profit - and the more you rely on old dirty coal to make up the numbers.

Leading to increased emissions overall.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Thanks NP

I thought that France was self sufficient with Nukes but looking at the charts, it is only the last few days that we have been exporting to France - presumably due to the cold snap they are having.

Thanks for your work on the 'power dashboard' - I find it quite interesting to look at.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Minchin

I think we export to France, who then export to germany? Would be interesting to see a french version of the figures...

Aye :)

Darren

Reply to
D.M.Chapman

No. As I said in a previous thread, at this time of year France imports electricity because a lot of French people (30-40% as I recall) rely on electricity to heat their homes. Many parts of France are too remote to be on a gas main, hence rural hypermarkets have bottled gas sales areas where we have garden centres. Heating your house with bottled gas is scarcely cheaper than electric heating (which also doesn't need complicated central heating equipment).

Another Dave

Reply to
Another Dave

So where are then Chermans getting their missing 8gig from?

Reply to
Tim Streater

I don't know. I only know they aren't getting it from France or from us via France. TNP thinks they get it from filthy dirty coal and he may well be right.

Another Dave

Reply to
Another Dave

Lor lumme strike a light.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Blimey. I stand corrected - I always thought france had stacks of power surplus from their Nuclear stations. Interesting.

Darren

Reply to
D.M.Chapman

Brown coal and France

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Google RWE to see how MUCH lignite they burn.

Also solar and wind are essentially zero. There's a site for Germany somewhere.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

No: they do about 85% nuclear. If they did much more they would end up having to shut them in the summer and that's not good uses of capital. They use a bit of hydro and a bit of gas to make up the numbers. Maybe some coal too - there's decent coal in the SE of france IIRC.

And probably a few token wind turbines to keep merkel happy.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

More than a few. Every year I spend about a month touring in France and every year more turbines appear. I think I'm going to stop going as result. Last year I had a long discussion with an Alsatian wind farmist; just like the discussions on here. It could have been the dog for all the difference I made :)

Another Dave

Reply to
Another Dave

These wonderous things happen in this small cupboard?

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that it's a Schuko plug bodged into a UK extension lead bought from Tesco, and a little french man feeding coins into the meter. I bet ya.

Reply to
Adrian C

In article , The Natural Philosopher writes

Spotted that this morning, we've been sending 2GW over the French interconnect for a few days now. Mind you, it's a tad chilly in Yoorp.

Also noted that the nuke, which had been sitting at ~7.9GW for a while, has gone up to 8.3GW. Did another one get switched on?

How far off maximum capacity are we?

Reply to
Mike Tomlinson

Quite a long way. Theoretically, going on declared availability, there another 13 -17.5 GW surplus looking 2 - 14 days ahead. But you need to reduce that by 4GW because wind may do sweet FA when called upon. Yesterday there was a possibility of demand reduction around

1700-1800 today as the declared generation fell below the demand peak, that was clearly flatlined.

Generation now exceeds predicted demand for that period by about 2GW

Reply to
The Other Mike

It is very unclear what is going on in the nuclear world - because of security issues they wont even let people visit a nuke anymore :(

Some info does exist.

There is a bit over 9GW of nuclear capacity still (capable of) running.

Reactors are not totally beyond throttling, and some plant is being run below max on account of old boilers and pipes that are in the last of the older reactors that may not be rated for full pressure.

Colder sea temperatures increase the efficiency of the condensers, and hence the whole power station.

At least one reactor is offline for refuelling at the moment.

The fuel is relatively so cheap that its never worth operating the reactors at less than the max you can squeeze out of them,so what is on the board reflects the total capacity more or less at any given time.

I'd say around 90%. The actual capacity factors of the older nukes is not great - they have averaged about 78% I think - over their 40 plus year lifetimes. Sizewell B has done a lot better IIRC. Up in the high

80's despite long periods of being partially or fully offline. A lot of reactor development has gone into faster routine refuelling cycles and even 'hot swapping' of fuel.

You can appreciate from Fukushima that removing rods with a lot of decay heat in them is not something you want to do - I believe in older reactors its normal to shut them down slowly and leave them to cool down before replacing fuel rods - and then bring them up slowly.

There are also periodic inspections of the inside of the containment vessels to see if the neutron fluxes have morphed the structure dangerously - that in the end is what makes them limited in life - the reactor vessels themselves are destroyed by radioactivity to the point of being unsafe, but as the current reactors come to the end, there is a lot of information coming out that says that they might actually be able to do more than the current 60 year life span that is already more than the 40 years they were designed to do.. In the USA there is some questioning of whether licenses should automatically be revoked at 60 years no matter what the condition is.

Certainly if we could keep the AGRS running another ten years it would help dramatically.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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Reply to
Jethro

Ah..thats TOTAL capacity...I thought he meant NUCLEAR capacity.

Yes. Thank **** we haven't got a bigger extension cable for France top plug into...

The grid that may be at risk is the German one. They cut their available spare capacity to the bone to get the nukes off...and the wind isn't playing ball either. Nor do their French friends have any to spare.

We still have not a few power stations off line - the oil burners and the OCGTS are offline and a percentage of coal and CCGT too.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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