Yes folks, its cheaper to heat with electricity!

[Jules]

[Andrew Gabriel]

This is a really big issue in the National Grid too...

a) Much of the grid equipment is now 50 years old and end of life. b) The grid was designed to carry power from the coal fired power stations mostly located at the coal mines to the industrial centres of 50 years ago. Coal generated power has halved and is intended to drop to very low levels. The industrial centres of 50 years ago are now mostly dead. This means the grid is not in the best places to transfer power from current and future generation plant to today's consumers. c) The grid is at max capacity. d) It now takes longer to build or upgrade one line (nearly 10 years, due to planning, public enquires, etc) than it took to build the whole grid 50 years ago.

This has lots of implications for new generation plant. Most of the potential renewable generation locations are nowhere near the grid. Even those that are are finding they can't feed power into the grid because it's already at full capacity, either locally, or at a distant bottleneck. One such is that Scotland can't feed more than 2GW to England, which is contributing to a 7 year waiting list for new generators in Scotland to get a connection to the grid. (This creates an interesting problem given that planning permission for new plant lasts for 5 years, so it's expired long before you can connect up, and no one's going to build plant 2 or more years before they can use it.)

It takes politicians to create such a fiasco.

EU is pushing (maybe even legislating) countries to ensure they have interconnects equivalent to 10% of their electricty requirement, to promote international competition in electricity sales. That actually seems unusually sensible. We're currently a long way off that with 2GW to France and 0.5GW to Ireland.

[Theo Markettos]

I do it by having mine under the stairs - it heats the hall, and the hot air rises to heat the upstairs too.

The (Cambridge) University Computer Lab building is entirely heated by computers and bodyheat - my office was nice and toasty when I had about 500W of equipment running yesterday. It can get a bit chilly at Christmas when there's not so much bodyheat around.

Theo

[CWatters]

Good site here for comparing costs...

[Appin]

The message from The Natural Philosopher contains these words:

Now, now ........ can't have the wife going out wearing a beard! :-)

[terry]

. [e-mail]...

Seems like an opportunity, with all the know how represented here, to ask a question that has been in mind for at least the last 50 years!

Recalling that, back in the early 1950s, read an article about a power cable across the North Sea from Scotland to Norway?

Recollection is that it was, or proposed to be, a DC cable with conversion from/to 50 cycle/hertz AC at each end. The purpose being to load share between the power grids of the two countries etc.

I'm pretty sure recalling the article is not a figment of my imagination.

But was that cable a fact or proposal?

Still very curious and would welcome any informed comment. Cheers.

[Andrew Gabriel]

First one (in recent years) was 10th December 2002. We were some

2-3 minutes from initiating load shedding (rolling blackouts). I don't know the cause -- most likely a cold spell causing a shortage of gas so that commercial consumers on cheap gas tarrifs have their gas cut off, some of whom were gas fired power stations, so we lose electricity generation capacity at peak heating demand.

When a power plant wants to supply power to the grid, it contracts to supply so much power for so much time. If it can't do it, it has to pay another power station to do so in its place. The market between suppliers means they carefully look to see if anyone else unexpectedly drops off the grid, and immediately jack up their prices to make maximum profit out of the failed plant which now has to pay a premium to other suppliers to replace the electricity it contracturally agreed to provide. On 10th December 2002, this mechanism forced the wholesale price of electricity to 500 times its normal price, and even then only just managed to keep the lights on by the skin of its teeth.

Planning for rolling backouts took place in the following winter, and only didn't happen because the weather forcast was wrong and it didn't get as cold as was predicted. I don't have subsequent dates, but there have been a number of supply shortage incidents since then. Prior to the 2002 incident, we'd had a supply infrastructure for decades with emergency capacity maintained in reserve which gave us one of the most stable supplies in the world. It was decided to mothball the emergency plant to save money (which required a change in the law). It would have taken months to get it back up working again.

[Pete C]

Get one of these:

Keep the boiler for the odd cold snap.

cheers, Pete.

[Tony Bryer]

If only it was so simple. Zambia and Zimbabwe have had the benefit of the Kariba Dam since the 1960s. What keeps Africa poor is the absence of good government.

[Steve Firth]

I didn't say it was simple, but greens attempting to stop development for their own political ends are suppressing the few chances that come to poor countries.

And until Mugabe Zimbabwe was rich.

I don't dispute that at all, but good government comes in part from people having a reasonable expectation for their standard of life.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Both somewhat too true to actually be funny..

[The Natural Philosopher]

Utterly agree, Or rather to not recognise tehdanger of not stepping in and stopping it.

Its all very well for landlocked brussels to say that, but it costs us

10x more to cross a strip of sea with a cable than an unmanned border post in luxembourg.

[The Natural Philosopher]

messagenews: [e-mail]...

Not sure if that one is a fact: others are,but the cost of the cable plus the cost of energy the other end has to be less than the cost of building a ocal power station, and by and large it isn't.

Undersea cable being pretty expensive things.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The big snag of that sort of scheme is not actually building it but distributing the electricity to where it's needed.

But of course it's easier to blame the greens when practical objections are raised.

[Huge]

Particularly given that I work from home ...

[Andrew Gabriel]

There was a proposal a couple of years ago to build a ring main or interconnect under the north sea, connecting UK, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, and also allowing easier connection of sea-based wind farms. Don't know where that's got to now.

[tony sayer]

But we're OK now we've got the windmills ;).. aren't we;!?...

[Steve Firth]

That has already been covered for this scheme.

The greens aren't raising "practical objections" they are objecting on unfounded principle.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yeah, right :(

[The Natural Philosopher]

Probably booted well into touch when the costs were calculated.

As with a lot off greenwash stuff, its all just more cat-belling.