OCGT up. coal up. no solar power and britain is net electricity exporter to Europe amd Irleand

..and right now, in order to to alarm the natives, BMreports who publish the raw data are mysteriously absent from the internet

Must be something wrong with your data. Solar did SFA today :)

More seriously - the graph concerned is titled "Hydro/Pumped/Bio" - Solar is missing. And it does show sometimes.

Andy

abou a gig atmidday

no, it doesn't

not on the title bar

just in the graph. like today.

Oh FFS here we go again.

With a minimum derated margin of around 4.2GW across the demand peak and zero loss of load probability for every half hour period today there always was plenty in reserve.

Plus as predicted a long time ago the sun did set today exactly when expected, when the sun shone and PV output peaked the gas inlet valves on many CCGT's were throttled and less gas was burnt reducing CO2 emissions. The heat input did not stay the same and efficiency was affected by a small part of a percentage point. No thermal plant of any description was left 'ticking over' in case the wind suddenly dropped or the sun was obscured by cloud.

No Mike. A lot more than that.

You should look at the published heat rate curves for CCGT.

Interestingly, near me they want to build a power storage facility in a green belt area with over 70 battery boxes, anciliary cabinets and control systems etc etc, just over the road from one of the major sub stations. its a private company. Does anyone actually know how these work and whether its likely to be of much use?

Brian

There was a piece on their use in California on the radio yesterday. But not for the UK. We need to stick with traditional ways of doing things like BSA motorbikes and so on. Not a good idea to do any research on new - we can always buy it from China.

They work exactly as you expect charging up when electricity is cheap and d ischarging when it is expensive. They have the advantage of instant power d elivery. There are some large existing facilities around the world with a m odest output (100MW or thereabouts) acting as giant UPS's for remote region s. Expect to see more facilities like that as end of life electric vehicle batteries become available (which will still have a fair capacity remaining ).

And are they really going to be equipped with partially knackered rechargeable batteries from old electric cars? The mind boggles!

And how many battery cells would be required for anything substantial? And how would maintenance be done for such a large pack, which is also going to be a fire hazard par excellence if one of the partially knackered rechargeable batteries eventually overheats? Would you like to be in the middle of such a pack, doing battery cell replacement, when it goes off?

Or is this just another hand-waving piece of b/s?

Scroll down for a picture of the modules in one such battery barn ..

And why wouldn't the knackered EV batteries have their materials recycled to avoid having to mine and process even more raw materials for the increasing number and all the replacements?

SteveW

Nissan are certainly looking into it

becaus it is ,more expensive and doesnt work as well?

In article , Tim Streater writes

Exactly. Otherwise a meaningless parameter for a battery.

Most 'eco' statistics are meaningless.

Earlier this year greenies were pestering me to get rid of the 'Coal' dial on gridwatch and put 'Solar' there already as coal was no longer relevant...

I pointed out that overall coal still produced more than solar by some margin.

Just not when they were looking..

The R4 piece about California quoted the figure based on a 4 hour perdiod. Not sure if this is a standard or not.