In the same way oil companies must keep 90 days of oil in reserve, it would focus the energy suppliers if they got heavy fines from the regulator for having insufficient capacity. They might think more than just giving away CFLs!
The fact they are private business doesn't mean they can't conform to government policy.
When I toured Drax in 1994 they said they had 18 months supply of coal on site, to get them through "interuptions in supply".
Remembering back to school chemistry lessons, there's at least
300 years supply of coal in the ground based on use for electricity generation at 1980 levels. (shows when I went to school :)JGH
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Jules saying something like:
Here, take one of these in the morning.
Wouldn't make any difference if they were.
Another Dave
At a guess, I'd say that NIMBY-ism has a part to play. No-one wants a nasty old gasholder to look at. They'd prefer everyone else runs out of fuel than to have their view (or worse, their house prices) affected by something so .... so ... industrial :-)
I sort of doubted that but unless my maths has gone arry it's less than a 300 m cube of coal.
300x300x300 = 27 million cu m. Coal is about 800 kg/cu m so thats 21.6 million tonnes of coal.Drax can burn 36,000 tonnes a day flat out.
36,000 * (365 * 1.5) = 19.7 million tonnes.So a heap 15 m high and 1400 m square will hold it (and more). Not that big really.
Actually, they were contributing 0.6% when I looked this morning. They never actually manage to contribute what they predict the day before.
I have it bookmarked, but it suddenly stopped working about a year ago; nothing more posted to it...
This is of course, true.
Andrew Gabriel wibbled on Tuesday 05 January 2010 17:01
Seems to be here now as mentioned a few posts back
When I visited Didcot a couple of years ago, they said that when they were run by the CEGB they had 6 months supply of coal. Nowadays, the operational people consider themselves lucky if they have 6 weeks supply and they have been as low as 6 days supply.
I was also told that NPower consider themselves to be an energy trading company not an electricity generating company. They trade in energy and will happily sell on the coal they have (both futures and if necessary, physical stock) and gas futures if it is more profitable to do so than to generate electricity. Also, if they didn't have an absolute obligation to supply the national grid with electricity, they would happily gradually shut down generation* rather than make electricity at either a loss or insufficient profit cf selling off their raw materials.
*Didcot A has 4 500MW units coal/gas co-fired and Didcot B has two 680MW units combined cycle i.e. gas-fired, so the whole plant has 6-units of generation capacity A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B2 which may be independently taken on- or off- line.
I think that's equally defunct. The history conks out same time the other site stopped reporting. The rest of that page has always looked believable.
I believe that in modern terms, the primary use of a gasholder or gasometer is not for storing gas, rather is used to ensure that the local pressure remains within an acceptable range. In storage terms, it is at best a local temporary buffer.
Gas is stored underground, in transmission pipelines at elevated pressure (line packing)and as LNG (iquified natural gas).
If we are going to return to coal, opencast mining is the way to go.
We're talking about much greater volumes of gas storage than a few old gasholders. We're talking about underground caverns.
There's one at Killingholme on the Humber Estuary, and that's about it. The geology of that area is perfect for constructing much more underground storage, but none of the gas companies wants to spend the money and the government is powerless to compel or even encourage them to invest.
So we have the lowest gas reserves, in terms of days, of any major European country that depends on gas.
It's madness, sheer madness. But that's what happens when you privatise public utilities and fail to put in place a mechanism for ensuring that obligations towards security of supply are met.
The privatised electricity industry is in an equally bad state, with capacity likely to fall well short of demand starting around 2014 because of the ongoing closure programme for existing nuclear power stations (life expired) and the remaining non-FGD* fitted coal fired stations (expiry of EU licence to operate). There was a half-arsed plan to fill the gap with further new gas- and coal-fired stations but this has stalled with Kingsnorth being cancelled altogether.
*FGD = flue gas desulphurisation
The proposed new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth has been cancelled. The government would like us to believe that it is merely slightly delayed, but there is no chance of it going ahead in the foreseeable future.
Do they have heaters in them to keep the blades from icing up? In which case, do they actually have a negative effect when not turning in colder weather?
Block off the channel tunnel at either end and use that during the winter. It's not like they can reliably run trains through it at this time of year anyway ;-)
Cobblers, the government, if it had a will, could do anything and everything it wished. It's all a question of priority and media attention.
The companies could also liquefy natural gas (LNG), in the same state it's transported around the world in LNG tankers.
Not that I'm aware of. I am aware of large lumps of ice been flung considerable distances from them though.
They do have to control icing as it will unbalance 'em but I think they achieve that with water repellant surafces and deicing chemicals.
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