1.4GW !

No, no, commercial fusion power is *twenty* years away, and has been for the last seventy years...

When you look at the plans for the 600MW solar farm near Newmarket, it's remarkable how small they are:

It's chicken and egg. Without an excess of power, it's not worth installing electrolyser plant to generate hydrogen. Without an excess of hydrogen, it's not worth building infrastructure to use it. It sounds like Teeside (where there's existing industry that uses hydrogen) is best placed to start the process, and there's a good source of offshore wind there.

Theo

Do I conclude, then, that you imagine that this *will* be sorted? If so, how?

Oh - and a battery that can replace the entire grid for a week will need to contain approx the same amount of energy as a 3 megaton atomic bomb. Better hope it's managed properly.

Whoever needs food security? Re-wild the farms! Build more homes! Erect more wind turbines!

The residents of Whitby scuppered their proposed hydrogen-fuelled boiler scheme.

LOL!

It is getting a bit closer.

Fast electronics plus a bit more understanding of plasma is making containment somewhat easier

^^^^^^^^^^ electrical

And what was the minimum amount of electrical energy generated in that time by renewables?

A lot of land area is not used for growing food, it's used for animal feed. If food security was such a concern we'd be growing crops there instead.

Hydrogen boilers are so inefficient that they're quite capable of scuppering themselves without any outside help.

Theo

note that when it is convenient all the scottish hydro and all the wood burnt at Drax is counted as 'renewable'. Clearly after dark on a calm night the contribution of wind and solar is the square root of sweet Fanny Adams...

The fact that renewable aficionados never mention that about half of all renewable so called energy in burning wood.

I'm never sure when these sorts of claims are made about how many houses could be powered etc, whether the figures relate to the boiler-plate output or whether they take into account the capacity factors. The former certainly wouldn't surprise me, and most people wouldn't question it.

I cant actually think of any claim made by renewable supporters that has ever checked out to be plain simple fact.

One w3onders why if its all so f****ng wonderful, they have to keep lying about it.

In the UK a lot of land with cattle or sheep isn't really suited for growing crops. Attempting to grow crops on unsuitable land requires artificial fertiliser and by the nature of most of this land can cause other problems such as run-off into rivers.

Boiler manufacturers are hedging their bets with boilers being suitable for either Hydrogen, Natural gas or a Hydrogen and Natural Gas mix.

Around my way all the main gas pipes are being replaced which has been ongoing for at least the past 15 years. The main A road that adjoins the road in which I live soon will be closed in one direction for 22 weeks while some of this work is carried out.

Instead of traffic light control I understand that the main road will become a one way road for the duration, with access to adjoining roads being cut off. This will mean people in adjoining roads will have to divert through back streets which are narrow with parking on both sides of the road.

Ongoing major work on the gas distribution system suggests the mass move to electric central heating is far off and perhaps some politicians are waking up to the real world reality with regards renewable electric energy.

Just out of interest, around 9am Gridwatch was showing that Wind was supplying less than 2% of our demand. While it's nice to make use of it when it's available (the best I've seen was some 59%), it's obvious that seem serious storage is required.

Cat beller. There is no serious storage available...now, and probably ever

What has this requirement to do with the likelihood that such storage can be created? Since such storage isn't and won't ever be available, doesn't it occur to you that this undermines the whole premise upon which the move to renewables is based?

ITYM “…some serious backup is required”.

And if backup is in fact required, why not dump the renewables crap and run the backup in its efficient mode?

Here are some real-world numbers:

During fire-up CCGT turbines are very inefficient, from ~0% for the first 5 minutes, to 25% to about 45 minutes, when the second part of the combined-cycle kicks in at about 60% efficiency.

The combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) uses ‘waste’ heat from the turbine to provide steam pressure to run a second generator, thus improving the overall efficiency of the system.

With 60% efficiency, each GW of power output uses 1/0.6=1.67GW of gas.

Interestingly, if a 1GW CCGT was replaced by a 1GW wind farm which used the CCGT as backup, real-world data suggests the latter, over a year, would produce an average of 0.36GW, leaving 0.64GW to be supplied by the CCGT in an intermittent regime of stop/start and throttled-back running in which it might be only 40% efficient overall.

So over the year the CCGT will use 0.64/0.4=1.6GW of gas, which is the same as if it ran in efficient mode and the wind farm didn’t exist, the latter having cost money and materials to no real effect.

Renewables are a waste of resources.

Solar energy density in the UK is about 100 W/m^2. PV efficiency 20%, makes that 20 W/m^2. So a practical upper bound for 10 km^2 is 200MW.

Overcapacity would be required for winter heating, solar in mid-winter is about 11% solar in mid-summer, heating usage is almost exclusively winter, so you'd need storage.

Even for a modest average UK average usage of 200 MW (industry, heating, transport, electricity, storage losses), you'd need 4% of UK Land area. If I were speccing it, I double that for realistic suboptimal issues.

I can't see it myself. As I said, maybe offshore wind, but that is a very big maybe.

Yeahbut, tick-tock, tick-tock. We don't really have the time to scale up, given we don't even have proof of concept.

Nuclear is so simple in comparison, plus we could reasonably expect huge economy improvements, if we put our mind to it.

Sorry, that should be 200 GW not MW. That is the entire UK average power usage.

Wiki gives UK annual energy consumption (2019) at 1.651 TWh, (= average