Dungeness is now back online and coming up to full power on the second reactor.
Only two reactors in the UK are down for statutory inspection, and one operating on 75% of capacity due to a boiler issue on one if its 4 boilers.
Barring unexpected outages all reactors should be operational at full capacity for January & February, when we need them most.
1GW plus of 'biomass' power has appeared on the grid.
BM reports lists only two power stations to which this category applies
- the 40MW wood burner - EONs Stevenscroft - and Tilbury. Tilbury was supposed to have been closed, but that appears not to be the case, as its running flat out, having been brought up early this morning.
I've emailed RWE for clarification on Tilbury's status.
The French interconnector appears to be up to full power again - a rare event - but the full 2GW is for now, available and in use. Likewise Moyle is running at only half power - I think they are replacing the whole cable after several attempts to repair the old one didn't last.
So most of the UKs capacity is going to be in good shape for what looks like being a pretty hard winter again.
Its usual to see a bit of OCGT and oil burner being run up at this time of year - to make sure it still works - but no sign yet on the dials.
which if it had been built by now, would be generating about twice what the wind does, on average. Reliably. And would do so for the next 40 years, not 15..without requiring an equivalent amount of backup gas, and being totally 'zero emissions' apart from a lot of warm sea-water suitable for cultivation mmm - farmed langoustines in?
Or we could have built about 7GW of coal, or 20GW of CCGT.
Of course that is subject to the guv-mint not changing the rules halfway through construction, meaning they have to redesign the whole plant, from the ground up - or some contractor delivering the wrong sort of concrete* or nuts for the bolts** halfway through.
*IIRC one of the chief reasons for delays at Okiluoto is that concrete that could be subject to high neutron flux needs to have special ballast in it that won't turn to rice pudding or some such. They had built half the containment when someone noted that they hadn't inspected the previous bit. So they tore it all down to make sure.
**an amusing anecdote told me by a man who used to drive robots inside reactors. The nuts were falling off, and when they tried to tighten them they fell to bits. The bolts were of the correct alloy that could handle a high neutron flux but the nuts were not. So he spent a year on a robot replacing every single one. I think this issue showed up after several decades of operation. Neutron (accelarted) corrosion is the main reason for limited reactor life. You can replace all the steam plant and systems outside the reactor, and the fuel rods inside, but when the steel and concrete pressure vessels and containment structures transmute into something else and accelerate stress corrosion, that's end of line time. He lamented that when the Magnox were finally decommissioned 'we weren't allowed any of the scrap for analysis'
Its also part of the reason why the current crop are running beyond their expected end of life, too. Statutory inspections consist (partially) in seeing how far this process has gone, and if it hasn't gone that far, trying to get an license extension to operate what is still perfectly serviceable kit.
And finally its the reason why you can't march in with a bulldozer, jack hammer and plasma torch to decommission. The concrete will have radioactive elements in traces and so too will the steel pressure vessel. I think that makes a fair amount of cobalt 60. If the steel has cobalt in it, for example. Some of these elements get knocked into radioactive isotopes - usually with half lives in decades - so the best strategy is to simply leave the thing in place for 60 years plus, for these to decay to something less- or in-active and THEN go in with the kit without having to take precautions.
It helps to have an adjacent working reactor to finance the security and box ticking that this entails.
Of course its wonderful ammunition for the 'we don't know how to decommission a reactor' brigade...
Now, harry, what was that about nukes being expensive compared to renewables? Bearing in mind that the decommissioning is built-in to the nuke price. Unlike, I suspect the wind/solar.
We need them now and in every month to come. 1GW of coal at Ferrybridge C is just about to expire under the LCPD (there was less than a 1000 hours of running left at the end of September) The crunch time could be in March 2014, declared nuclear capacity is falling off to 5.6GW in week 10, add in a blocking high, gas import restrictions, zero FR and NED interconnector import due to mainland Europe demand and a shortfall is more possible then than at any time over the
2013/14 winter period.
Even sooner there is currently just 8.2GW plant surplus this Friday including an assumed 7GW of wind and 1.1GW of hydro. Just a bit too much wind for the white elephants and the country is f***ed.
There is nothing running at Tilbury as it's run out of hours (it had 86 hours left at the end of September 2013*) and stopped generating in July 2013. It currently retains the previous levels of transmission entry capacity of around
1GW but legally it can't run.
The BM reports spreadsheet is incorrect as it's incorrectly categorising three units, Ironbridge 1 & 2 and Drax 2 as coal rather than Biomass.
19/11/2013 declarations for 'Large' Biomass (i.e. plant greater than 100MW)
Ironbridge Unit 1 330MW, Unit 2 200 -> 340MW
These are converted 500MW coal units opted out of the LCPD and so must be closed by the end of 2015, but with around 10000* hours remaining between them.
Drax Unit 2 570 MW
This is a converted 660MW coal unit, the first one of three, next one goes live in 2014, all opted in to LCPD, at least 10 years operation remaining if the lumberjacks can keep up.
Add in Stevens Croft at 44MW and the current 1200+MW looks correct
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From that spreadsheet you'll also see that Fawley (Oil) only ran 837 hours between January 2008 until closure in March 2013, or an average of around a week of operation per annum at first glance but more recently it's actually worse than that, see below :)
It's been on reduced transfer capability due to overhead line restringing in the Kent area.
No decisions as yet on any recabling of the Moyle Interconnector. It's of far more significance for those in NI than those elsewhere in the UK.
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They probably can't afford to test it :) . It will have been shut down and mothballed correctly. If plant needs to run then it will be made to run. With the price of gas some older CCGT's may not run at all unless the shit really hits the fan with a very large failure of coal or nuclear generation. There is no doubt the recession aids this generation shortfall shitfest enormously, with a functioning and growing economy the lights would be going out this winter.
I mentioned the total run hours of Fawley above since the start of the LCPD. Economics dictate that we may not see any oil plant run again in the UK. Last winter with three oil fired stations available, Grain didn't run at all, Fawley ran for 19 hours and Littlebrook for 13. In the previous winter Fawley ran for
Mike: I've looked into this and they are assuming 7GW of wind in that. According to the weather forecast there is going to be bugger all wind and it will be very cold indeed.
So watch those dials on Friday.
Assuming we still HAVE electricity of course ;-)
I've updated the biomass dial to cope with the sudden appearance of all the wood-burners and edited the tooltips to reflect the new reality. Moyle is half power now for years it seems and the E-W is out for a few days altogether.
The old ones were a bit "strange". For the dispatchable sources it would be nice to have a red line that marked the "known" maximum capacity of that source and an orange section below that. So when you look and all the dispatchable needles are in the orange and it's only
1600 you know it's time to dust off the standby kit ...
Well that's OK provided they are using the information that is there in a proper and balanced way. Not just pointing at the windmills producing 12% of the demand (as they are now) but coal is 40%, nuke
19% and CCGT 17% ...
Teachers must also point at the weekly/monthly/yearly graphs to show that wind is unpredictable and really very "peaky". Then ask the question where does the energy come from when the wind isn't blowing, ie about 2/3rds of the time?
Cold tonight (we have light dusting of snow but air temp has risen to
0.4 C from about -3 C at 1700), I'd expect us to be above freezing during the day maybe even as warm as 5 C max towards the end of the week. Nights may well be cold if it stays clear under the high pressure, -3.8 C at 0800 this morning, ground frost didn't clear in sheltered spots.
Friday
Yep, maybe 1 to 2 GW. So that leaves us with 8.2 - 7 + 2 = 3.2 GW surplus with a peak demand of 50 GW 6% margin at best, maybe down to
4%. Tight but not unduly but shift that to a 55 GW peak, oops!
At night, there is still a bit of warmth in the sun around midday. It isn't going to be "end of February" cold, with ice days etc.
Tilbury does appear to be closed due to lack of hours even though it is converted to burn biomass. But looking at the Tilbury pages on the RWE site maybe the current conversion from coal to biomass isn't clean or effcient enough to enable it to run as a biomass station.
Donno about Ironbridge but I thought Drax was mixed fueling rather than pure Biomass, but that could be refering to the site overall rather than individual units... It's damn difficult for the average punter to sort the wood from the trees as far as what unit at what station is burning what.
Well the oil burners at Fawley and Grain are closed according to their owners websites.
That leaves Littlebrook as the only(?) operational oil burner in the UK and it is also one of the black start stations. Trouble is it is opted out of the LCPD so will close at the end of 2015. The OCGT's used to black start the main station also auto start (off to synchronised and on load in < 5 mins) if the grid frequency drops too low. So not only do we lose another GW+ of capacity we also lose a black start facility and possibly frequency stabilisation as well.
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