Appendum to UK Power Generation

In the '70s, '80s and '90s, we could have used the leeway that our massive reserves of coal, oil and gas gave us to institute a programme of nuclear power and some renewable sources.

Instead, we had the "dash for gas", used up all our resources building gas fired power stations and stupidly closed the coal mines for political reasons. People were scared of nuclear, so we didn't build any, and now we're finding that wind and solar are in the chocolate teapot league apart from some off-grid applications. My home is currently running "carbon free" due to some accounting trickery where the supplier agrees to buy the total amount of energy I use from renewable resources, rather than charging it to the coal and gas accounts, while still guaranteeing me continuity of supply. Hypocritical, maybe, but it encourages them to use carbon free sources wherever they can.

Even when we were a net exporter of oil, we still had to import some, as the North Sea Oil didn't have the right mix of ingredients to let us make what we needed, and as the new reserves produced by fracking are only gas, we'd still be importing large amounts of oil, and almost all our coal.

On 14/12/2012 12:05, John Williamson wrote: ...

They were going to go anyway. It was cheaper to ship coal from Australia than to get it from British mines.

Colin Bignell

Precisely. Simple economics.

With emphasis on simple.

And is this still the case?

Oil used to be $25 a barrel. It's rather unwise to plan ahead on the basis of what any type of imported energy costs at one point in time. Of course it would be naive to think any politician is interested in the future beyond the next election.

Quite. Thatcher realised there was enough North Sea oil and gas to get through any possible time she'd still be prime minister. Beyond that nothing mattered.

In article , Nightjar writes

'Was' being the operative word.

Certainly coal form the USA and IIRC poland is very cheap.

there is an awful lot of coal in the USA. worlds biggest reserves, and most of it open cast too.

To be fair, politicians - even half decent ones, and I think she was half decent - have their hand full solving the problems their predecessors have left, never mind looking ahead too far. One of the things I have decided is that unlike the green fantasists, the world is actually too complex to make it worth having more than contingency plans for a few decades ahead.

In my time running companies I learnt to be very astsurte in delaying decisions about things, on the basis that around 60% of all decisions would be utterly irrelevant by the time the next board or management meeting happened. If an issue made it to three board meetings in a row, then generally it really was important, and generally by that time the answer was a no-brainer.

Its getting that way now with energy. the answer is a no-brainer. Fracked gas coal and nuclear. The problem is there are a lot of people who have less than no brain at all.

still the case. We cant compete with vast open cast mines in the USA or poland.

And even cheaper since the bottom dropped out of the US coal market with the advent of shale gas. Are the US not going to learn from our "dash for gas"?

Pathetic.

And you have some evidence to back up your assertion that this is no longer the case?

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

that, of course, ignores the cost and environmental impact of shipping it from Down Under.

So that's even cheaper.

And its closer.

Shipping something half way around the world is often cheaper and has less environmental impact than delivering it from the docks to an average distance destination within the UK.

Colin Bignell

I ran a script to get a rough idea of how many people are watching the gridwatch site..the log goes back to Sunday.

vps:/var/log/apache2# cat gridwatch.access.log | awk '{print $1}'\; | sort -u | wc -l

Over three thousand different IP addresses have accessed the site this week.

No wonder the traffic stats are on the up.

Now if only they paid me 5p a hit...

Probably, given that Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal and sells 35 million tonnes per annum to Europe. Although, at 47Mt/a South Africa is the largest external supplier to Europe. The biggest world market for coal today is the Far East, and most of Australia's coal goes there.

Adjusted for inflation, $25.10 a barrel in 1979 is equivalent to $78.73 in 2012.

Australian open cast coal mining was always going to be significantly cheaper than deep coal mining in the UK, even with the transport costs. Of course, today we have open cast mines of our own, but nothing on the scale of Australia.

Colin Bignell

You could do worse than lob some Google Adsense bits on it - not hugely instrusive, not hugely millionaire making but you might get a few quid from time to time :)